Checking the health of the airlines in real time is the ambitious goal of GE Engine Services, the $5 billion a year revenue service and support arm of the world's largest commercial engine manufacturer.

Relying heavily on artificial intelligence, GE aims to sort the torrent of digital data flowing through a modern airliner from its airframe, control systems, engines, avionics and power systems to identify any developing fault while in flight and beam a warning to GE's real-time monitoring station.

There, further artificial intelligence will analyze the anomaly and identify a solution. The action to be taken will be e-mailed to the airline, which can have engineers ready and waiting when the airplane lands at its destination.

The goal isn't far off; GE Engine Services already monitors its engines and accessories in real-time as a service to the airline on Canada 3000's six Airbus A320 and two A330 aircraft. Over the last 18 months it has been able to save aircraft downtime by notifying the airline of necessary maintenance actions. For example, when a fan began to run slightly out of balance, engineers were ready on landing to tighten two bolts as instructed by GE, which monitored the engine on the next flight to ensure the problem was solved.

"This is the first airline customer we are serving on an interactive basis," said David Brandel, manager of remote diagnostics at GE Aircraft Engines. Although GE monitors engines live on 600 other aircraft to better understand how they are working in operation, it hasn't yet sold a real-time diagnostic service to those operators.

The secret of the service is the heavy automation needed to examine the datastreams from the aircraft, and the building of a database of performance and fault analysis for use by the artificial intelligence programs.

"We're on the edge of pushing to the next level as more data becomes available," said Brandel. GE formed a venture with computer and communications giant Harris Corp. earlier this year to explore the commercial possibilities, which could include diagnostics of complete aircraft and all their systems while in flight. "GE Harris Aviation Information Solutions LLC, based in Melbourne, Florida, will provide the next enabling step," said Brandel.

By John Morris