Page 9 - Jan22T

Better Than Insurance
So, let's say your logs go AWOL; what type of impact will that have on your aircraft’s market value? Accord- ing to the experts, a good average is 20-percent of the retail resale price.
While you can’t buy “insurance” on those valuable docu- ments, you can eliminate the risk by having the digitization wizards at Bluetail scan and store all of your paper logs and documents. Once all of your aircraft’s records are safely stored in Bluetail’s digital cloud, you never have to worry about where your important information is ever again.
When you need to check anything, sign onto Bluetail’s network, enter your information, and quicker than you can read this sentence, your aircraft’s entire maintenance history is at your fingertips.
And it’s not just bizjet operators who are finding peace of mind with Bluetail. Savvy pilot/owners are taking ad- vantage of the many benefits that this innovative service offers. Phil Rosenbaum has owned his 1999 Pilatus PC-12 since it was factory new, and he appreciates the benefits of having all of his records digitized and secured.
“I’ve owned enough airplanes to know that the logbooks are a very significant part of its value. If they’re lost or damaged, you can replace them, but that can still lessen the perception as a whole in that aircraft’s history. Was that maintenance actually done?” he said. “With Bluetail, no one can ever contest the validity or accuracy of my records.”
“On top of that, the ability for my MRO to quickly and accurately search through over 20-years-worth of mainte- nance information is another benefit,” Rosenbaum added. “Not having to manually look through all those logs and files saves hours and hundreds of dollars when the airplane is in for maintenance.”
Going Mobile Without Going Anywhere
Another significant benefit is that the aircraft’s records can be easily and securely shared with anyone, anywhere, anytime. Ah, the beauty of our digital world.
“No matter where the aircraft goes for any inspec- tion, repair or upgrade, all of its documents are eas- ily accessed by anyone with the owner’s approval,” Guerrieri said.
“We recently signed a large aircraft management company for that very reason,” Illian added. “One of their Gulfstreams was up in Appleton for
an unplanned maintenance event. Well, all of
the aircraft’s paper logbooks were in Texas. They had to load boxes of books and binders into a Bonanza and fly them to Wisconsin before the shop could complete the work.”
“It wasn’t only inconvenient; it signifi- cantly increased the cost and time it took to get that airplane back in service,” he said. “Bluetail completed digitizing
the records for their fleet, eliminat- ing that problem for good.”
Bluetail’s Digital Alchemy
Okay, you’re thinking, “digitizing my aircraft’s records is a good idea. I’ll just skip over to the local office store and have them do it for me.” Oh, if it were only that easy. But it’s not. To provide the level of searchability and share- ability they offer, Bluetail had to “reinvent” how aircraft logs are digitized.
Guerrieri and Illian both have extensive backgrounds in high-tech, so they had an immediate head start on what wasn’t available to operators before Bluetail’s intro- duction in 2019.
“When we started looking at the current offerings in this space, it quickly became evident that they were tied to old technologies, and we could do something much better,” Illian said. “They didn’t have access to any of the cloud-based tools we have today. Those allow us to offer many more services including search, auto-organization, character/signature recognition, machine learning – the kinds of capabilities that no one else in the segment has taken advantage of.”
“You can scan a bunch of pages, but if you can’t organize them or access the data individually, then you basically have nothing more than an electronic filing cabinet,” Il- lian continued. “It’s not much use.”
No matter your reason for having your logs digitized, the first step is to get them scanned. And that’s harder than you may think.
“The first thing we did was put our scanning network in place. We have a scanning partner who understands how the logbooks and documents need to be handled,” Illian said. “We provided their technicians with training on how to handle each situation. It’s a pain in the butt to do it correctly, but you have to.”
Of course, like every other part of Bluetail, the part- ners concentrated their efforts on finding a scanning
January 2022 / TWIN & TURBINE • 7