AirBaltic Utilizes Flightlink On C Series Aircraft

Along with Swiss International Airlines, airBaltic was an early bird in ordering Bombardier’s C Series aircraft. The Latvian carrier has now received seven of its 20 CS300s.

“The aircraft has performed beyond company expectations, delivering better overall performance, fuel efficiency and convenience for both staff and the passengers,” a spokesperson says.

AirBaltic also subscribed to Bombardier’s analytic service, Flightlink. The most notable benefits expected from proactive maintenance are reduced maintenance costs, increased reliability and continued improvements in punctuality and regularity.

To exploit Flightlink, airBaltic maintenance staff had to pass a comprehensive aircraft health monitoring course presented by Bombardier. “In addition, duties for some positions within the company were adjusted to monitor maintenance data coming from the C Series fleet, and an IT system was set up to route and store maintenance data,” the spokesperson explains.

    Once a CS300 lands, all maintenance-related data is automatically offloaded to airBaltic servers. “In order to find the desired report, you only need to access the server,” the spokesperson says. Manual downloads are also possible by copying maintenance reports to USB sticks or printing smaller reports on cockpit printers.

In any case, the data are then analyzed by airBaltic’s reliability engineers, who watch performance closely. All reliability engineers have access to the data.

Unlike Swiss, which is part of the powerful Lufthansa Group, and Delta Airlines, a global major that will also operate the C Series, airBaltic is modest in size, with seven CS300s, 11 Boeing 737s and 12 Q400s. But it prides itself on innovation and achieving the best on-time performance globally in 2014 and 2015.

Both the performance of the new aircraft and its analytics are critical to maintaining airBaltic’s reputation.