Aviation data and analytics

This category covers flight data analytics, fuel and operational efficiency analysis, and predictive maintenance and health monitoring services. Maintenance software of record is a separate guide, and so is flight operations software. What makes analytics its own purchase is that the product is an inference drawn from your own data, and both halves of that sentence carry obligations.

The data has protections, and they are specific

A flight operational quality assurance programme is an FAA-approved programme for the routine collection and analysis of digital flight data gathered during aircraft operations, and the rule that governs it prohibits the use of that data for enforcement purposes under the stated conditions.¹ Separately, the FAA protects from disclosure certain safety and security information submitted voluntarily, under a part that sets out how information is designated as protected, when it may be disclosed, and how design and production approval holders must handle protected information they receive.² Ask a vendor exactly which of your data flows into its platform, in what form, de-identified or not, and who else sees it. Ask what happens when the vendor wants to use your data in a fleet-wide benchmark, and ask for that permission to be explicit rather than buried. Ask what happens to your data if the vendor is acquired.

An inference is not an authorisation to act

A predictive maintenance alert does not change who may perform maintenance or what data they must use. Maintenance must be performed using the methods, techniques and practices in the manufacturer's maintenance manual or the instructions for continued airworthiness, or others acceptable to the Administrator, with the necessary tools and test apparatus.³ Work released under a repair station certificate stays inside that certificate's ratings and the station's own procedures.⁴ So ask how the vendor's output enters your maintenance system: as advisory information, as a task raised against approved data, or as a recommendation somebody has to translate. Ask who owns the decision, and what the record says afterwards. A vendor that has thought this through will describe the workflow without being prompted.

Measure the claim

Ask for the definition behind every headline number: what counts as a detection, what counts as a false alert, and over what population the rate was computed. Ask for a backtest on your own historical data before purchase, and agree the success criteria in advance. Ask what data volume and quality the model needs to work, and what your recording configuration would have to change to provide it. Ask what the integration actually requires from your engineering and IT teams, in weeks.

Questions that sort vendors

Ask for the data protection and ownership terms in the contract, not in the pitch. Ask for a backtest against your data with agreed criteria. Ask how alerts become approved maintenance actions in your system. Ask which comparable operators run this today, and ask them what it costs to keep it working.