RFID Slowly Gaining Applications

The application of radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags has been slow in coming to commercial aviation. Costs are the big restraint and the technology is not applicable in quite as many ways as early supporters hoped.

But low-cost chips are being embedded by some airlines in luggage tags because RF tracking has a better success rate than straight-line bar-code scans.

More complex tasks include an instant read on the maintenance pedigree of a replaceable part to see if its useful life is up or whether it is time to overhaul a rotable part. The ability to drill down into the history of a part is limited only by the chip’s memory size.

Credit: SNAP-ON

Boeing and Airbushelped to lead the Air Transport Association’s Spec 2000 drive for common RFID standards, and they later moved on to an electronic product code in a push to advance an aviation e-marketplace.

Despite all these developments, U.S. military services, not commercial aviation, are the leaders in RFID technology. Still, Boeing, Lufthansa and others are persistent. Boeing has teamed with Fujitsu to create airline maintenance’s newest remote-sensing technology application. Called Component Management Optimization (CMO), it grew out of a 2005 request from Japan Airlines, which was spending as much as 13 hr. to perform one-by-one visual inspections of oxygen generators. JAL wondered if RFID chips might reveal the maintenance and performance status of the generators in a simple scan. It could. A technician walking down an airplane aisle can complete an RFID oxygen generator check in a mere 8 min., says Boeing CMO Program Manager Phil Coop. Similarly, passenger life vests can be quickly inventoried. Because the chip detects if the vest’s storage pouch has been disturbed, it also can reveal if it needs to be inspected or replaced.

Boeing expects to announce its launch customer for CMO this week, Coop says. Initially, it will be applied to managing cabin emergency equipment. Later, Boeing will add asset management features to cover rotables, repairables, airframe degradation, essential cabin equipment and powerplants.

Through trial and error, Boeing found that RFID is not the solution for every task. Sometimes its antenna can be fooled; in other instances the environment is too harsh. So CMO also will make use of Contact Memory Buttons from MacSema of Bend, Ore. The golden-colored, coin-size buttons have been used for years on military aircraft, such as the two shown monitoring a line-replaceable unit on an AH-64 Apache (right photo), says MacSema Vice President Denis Boulet. Boeing is the first to apply them to civil aircraft.

Even when RFID is not the best solution, it has prompted a search for something that is. For the better part of a decade, Snap-on struggled with how to apply the chips for better inventory control of aerospace hand tools. But even the smallest chip could not be applied to a thin-wall socket without jamming it. Snap-on’s solution was to adapt laser technology that it sells to auto repair shops for wheel alignments.

Credit: MACSEMA

Customers such as Raytheon Co.,Sikorsky and theU.S. Air Forcewanted better accounting of hand tools to improve their asset management control. They also were interested in anything that might reduce the chance that an unaccounted-for tool became a source for foreign object damage (FOD), Joe Chwan, director of Snap-on’s worldwide aerospace sales, explained during Aviation Week’s MRO Conference and Exhibition in Miami last week.

The Kenosha, Wis.-based company has introduced a roll-away tool chest that uses a laser scanner to record the position of every tool in a drawer, right down to replaceable screwdriver heads called Apex bits (left photo). If a torque wrench is due for recalibration, the chest warns a technician. And it always demands that tools be put back in their rightful location. Even a worn-out Apex bit must be replaced so it can be accounted for. The chest will alert the tool-crib manager so it can be disposed of properly.

Lufthansa Technik Logistik is one of many maintenance specialists pushing for RFID acceptance. By the end of the year, the company expects to introduce its own RFID applications. The chips will first be applied to manage oxygen generators, says Tom Burian, Lufthansa’s RFID project manager.

In the early days, RFID technology was not mature enough for aviation applications, says Burian. Now cost is one big restraint, the need for wider acceptance by supply-chain managers another. Asset managers at MRO say the best solution will come when big commercial businesses start ordering RFID so chip prices plunge. As one of them says: “Hurry up, Wal-Mart!”