Innovating Aircraft Repair Processes: The Role of Digitalization in Sustainability

Kurzfassung

The aviation industry is facing growing demands to reduce its environmental impact while ensuring operational safety and economic viability. As aircraft maintenance plays a central role in the lifecycle of aviation components, optimizing these processes is essential for achieving long-term sustainability. Digitalization as key enabler offers new ways to plan and execute repair processes more efficiently. A central element is the systematic collection and use of process data. By capturing detailed results from non-destructive testing such as visual inspections, and other diagnostic methods in structured databases, organizations can create a digital memory of component conditions, defect histories, and repair outcomes. These databases allow for data-driven process planning, enabling maintenance teams to identify patterns, anticipate failure modes, and select repair strategies based on evidence rather than experience. Complementing this data-centric approach, simulation-based process planning allows for virtual testing and optimization of repair procedures before carrying them out in practice. Through simulations, various repair scenarios can be evaluated in terms of time, cost, and environmental impact. This supports more sustainable decision-making by minimizing waste, rework, and downtime. Together, the integration of inspection data management, data analytics, and simulation technologies paves the way for a more intelligent and sustainable repair ecosystem in aviation.