Aerospace & Aviation Industry

Aerospace and aviation companies spend billions of dollars each year to keep their product and technical manuals current.

Each year, aerospace and aviation companies spend billions of dollars to ensure that their product and technical manuals remain current and reflect the latest developments in aircraft maintenance technology.

The stakes are high. In addition to potential safety-related issues, the Federal Transportation Authority will ground aircraft without up-to-the-minute documentation.

Case Study

Advanced Technical Documentation System Helps Slash Cost and Time of Distributing Manuals

When Lockheed Martin Aeronautics won the contract to design and build the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, a multipurpose aircraft, it also acquired a major logistical challenge. The F-35 would be built for all three armed forces branches, as well as a number of allied countries. However, while each country and armed forces branch would share many common features on the multipurpose fighter, each would also modify minor features to fulfill its unique mission and requirements. The resulting changes had to be accounted for within the supporting technical data, while also maintaining a significant level of reuse of common aircraft data.

The company had extensive experience working with paper manuals used to support previous aircraft, and they were aware that distributing changes for these traditional manuals would be expensive and time consuming. Changes would have had to be faxed, e-mailed, or, more often than not, shipped to the respective bases for incorporation into existing paper manuals.

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Keeping those complex technical and maintenance documents current, however, represents a major challenge for aviation and aerospace companies. To do so adequately, most companies need to convert legacy manuals into automated work books, improve authoring and collaboration systems with other suppliers and stay abreast of constantly changing industry guidelines and standards such as AECMA and ATA.

With our deep experience in technical documentation systems, we can help aerospace and aviation overcome these challenges. For example, we recently helped a U.S. airline deploy an aircraft maintenance documentation system that supports S1000D, an emerging XML-based standard for all aerospace and defense companies.

From Document Linking to XML Conversion

Our extensive experience in XML and link management can help aerospace and aviation companies improve document linking systems, deploy content management systems, streamline the production of training manuals and convert legacy documents to XML.

Contact us to learn more about how we can help you streamline your content-related operations.