Safety in the Skies Begins on the Ground: Effective Creation and Management of A380 Service Literature

GUTERSLOH, Germany - Flight operation for the Airbus A380 begins today: the largest and most modern aircraft in the world will begin flight service for Singapore Airlines with flight SQ380 to Sydney.

Due to strict aviation product liability, maintenance and safety regulations, Airbus must supply extensive product literature in a whole variety of technical manuals. Considering that the orders for this completely new aircraft strongly vary according to customers' wishes, one can only try to imagine the complexity involved in the production and management of the documentation.

After an extensive benchmarking process, Airbus decided to use the empolis:Content Lifecycle Suite for the effective creation and management of parts of the service literature. The system is productive with 130 users in parallel.

Primarily the future-proof coverage of all requirements demanded of standardized, electronic documentation through a single system, convinced the responsible department. Furthermore, the empolis:Content Lifecycle Suite fulfils the high expectations for structuring and comprehensibility and opens enormous rationalization potential for creation, quality assurance, translation and publication process control.

The publication system provides authoring services, content management, extensive link management, as well as variant and version management and fulfils all requirements for process control, data integrity, data quality and the "ATA iSec 2200" specification. The Air Transport Association of America, Inc. (ATA) is the oldest and largest airline trade association in the U.S., representing the nation's leading airlines. The ATA helps develop standards and regulations that shape the appearance and specifications that enhance aviation safety, security and well-being. With the system from empolis, the comprehensive structure repair manual (SRM) and other documentation, such as NTM, CMM, DFPRM, ARM, AC and MFP, is produced.

"We are thrilled and proud that we were able to stand out and prevail over the best suppliers in the world", says Andreas Rempe, empolis vice president. "We guarantee quality, speed, and outstanding service on a very high technological level for the core process entrusted to us."