There’s a maxim in this business most preach, but not everyone practices with unbridled passion. It’s a variation on the theme ‘service begins after the sale.’ For Pratt & Whitney Canada, “Facilitating good maintenance at an affordable price,” is the best of best practices says Tim Swail, the engine-maker’s vice president of customer programs. It begets more [powerplant] availability, more predictability for the customer in their business environment.
The most important word in the MRO lexicon these days just might be just be ‘predictability.’ It’s certainly the driver at Pratt’s north of the border engine operations. “Our customers really are expecting us to deliver maintenance solutions that manage their business in the most predictive way they can,” says Geoffrey Corbeil, general manager of P&WC aftermarket commercial aviation.
PWC focuses on four such solutions, one of them embryonic; the others at various stages of maturation. “There’s really a common thread” that stitches them all together, asserts Corbeil. “Beyond the dependability of the [powerplant per se] is delivering guaranteed services.”
Here they are: The Oil Analysis Technology Program, FAST, Eagle Service Plan and SMART.
The Oil Analysis Technology Program is one of the newest arrows in P&WC’s quiver. Engine oil analysis, of course, is nothing new, been around for years. In written response to AMT questions, P&WC says its new system is “innovative … allowing us to assess — with a high degree of precision and detail — what’s going on inside the engine without removing it, so we can diagnose issues sooner and potentially prevent events entirely.”
Without delving too deeply in the weeds (and the same time not divulging proprietary parts of the process) Swail contends, “We do something very different in monitoring the oil.”
Traditional engine oil analysis relied on a technique called SOAP, or the Spectrometric Oil Analysis Program. P&WC insists its new approach is “much more sensitive than incumbent oil debris monitoring technology.”
What Pratt’s new initiative does, according to Swail, is triangulate the specific metallic alloys in the oil, drilling down to find from what component in the engine they come from. The effort is especially good at monitoring the health of oil-wetted engine components, things such as bearings, carbon seals, and various gears.
The end game, he says, is to “continue to bring a more planned environment to our customers — helping their maintenance costs and transitioning into a more planned environment. Hard, scheduled maintenance approach.”
The next step in the end game as far as the oil analysis program is concerned is continuation of a critical clinical trial, one in which — at present — some 2,000 P&WC engines are registered. “We’re actively recruiting [operators] and encourage” anyone flying P&WC engines to help form the statistical baseline says Corbeil.
“We’re inviting customers to participate so that we have a number of engines across all our product families where we're collecting this information, says Swail. “We consider the analysis very well calibrated already. But [we want to] get out there and get an additional level of field data.” As the program progresses P&WC plans to share the resultant data with customers, as well as the larger aviation community. The aim is to tell specific customers how the findings apply to them and their operations.
This is no mere academic exercise on Pratt’s part. It’s actionable intelligence. Evidence?
“We absolutely have cases already where we’ve been able to advise a customer to schedule maintenance, or to keep a customer flying. This clinical phase,” contends P&WC’s vice president of customer programs, “is going to take us to the next level.”
Data is to be collected over the next 12 to 24 months.
“We know a lot now, and we can put it to good use. We’ve given ourselves a set of objectives built around maintenance costs and [aircraft] availability,” says Tim Swail.
There’s no cost to customers to participate in the oil analysis effort. The process revolves around a pre-packaged kit. Take your own oil sample. “We’ll send it” to one of two analysis centers, he says. If you’d like to participate in the program as an early adopter, contact your P&WC field support representative (FSR). Once in, follow a simple four-step process:
• Collect an oil sample every 100 to 500 hours, depending on the engine model;
• Ship a sample to P&WC in a prepaid envelope;
• Wait for word on the analysis;
• Receive a summary report on the analysis’ findings.
An important note: this program in no way replaces existing requirements in your current maintenance program. As always, follow the EMM’s (Engine Maintenance Manual). If you want some clarification on an issue, as always, contact your FSR or email P&WC at [email protected].
The oil analysis effort is exciting stuff, but it’s not all that’s going on at Pratt. Consider:
FAST (Flight Acquisition Storage and Transmission)
First rolled out back in 2011, the turnkey engine diagnostics and prognostics program is now installed in more than 580 aircraft. This includes the aircraft of 20 regional airlines. What now seems commonplace was once cutting-edge. Such are the ways of technology.
FAST analyzes and shoots off in-flight data to customers within 15 minutes of landing. The idea is to get ahead of the operational power curve when it comes to dispatch and maintenance — as well as cutting operating costs.
Linking FAST conceptually with Pratt’s new oil analysis approach is the age-old concept of listening, “listening to the engines — whether it be from the oil sampling or the data that we pull off a flight recording and various parameters,” says Swail, “and, getting information from customers about how well the engine's performance is trending, how specific components are faring so that we can get recommendations to them in advance about a problem that might cause a delay or cancellation."
He says the new oil analysis technology and FAST solutions are really part of the set of diagnostics, prognostics, and health monitoring that continue to evolve.
Pratt possesses a pair of evolving sales and marketing-based initiatives too. Both are designed to infuse the process with more predictability.
The engine-maker is introducing a new twist to its pay-per-hour ESP (the Eagle Service Plan) initiative. It provides gratis maintenance coverage for the first 400 hours for new PT6A powerplant. The venerable PT6 line has been around for half a century now, just having celebrated its 50th birthday last year.
Finally, there’s SMART — more specifically upgrades to the fixed-cost pricing program. Enhancements to the PT6A, PW100, and turboshaft engines now are in play. PW&C says, “There are now 25 SMART solutions and growing.” The company is tailoring SMART solutions to its product lines, offering more pricing options on more powerplants, says Swail. “On certain planes we’re simply a capped cost or controlled cost for an overhaul or hot section. Facilitating good maintenance at an affordable price just leads to more availability, more predictability for the customer and their business environment.”
Indeed, in the industry as a whole, after-sale maintenance and marketing solutions help build layer upon layer of mechanisms designed to take some of the guesswork out of this precise business called MRO.
About the Author
Jerome Greer Chandler
Jerome Greer Chandler is a two-time winner in the Aerospace Journalist of the Year competition's Best Maintenance Submission category; he won in 2000 and 2008. He received the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2017 Aerospace Media Awards in Paris, France. His best-seller 'Fire and Rain' chronicles the wind shear crash of Delta Flight 191 at DFW.