Customer stories


United Airlines

Maintaining Safety in the Skies

 Safe, fast, and reliable. Those of us who fly take aircraft maintenance for granted -- but for those behind the scenes keeping planes in the air and on time is a never-ending, incredibly complex job. And there's no room for guesswork. At United Airlines, one of the tools the engineering staff uses to ensure every step of their work is completely documented is FileMaker Pro -- the award-winning database software application from FileMaker Inc.

United Airlines turned to FileMaker Pro more than a decade ago, making use of every succeeding version of the software from 1.0 up to the present. "It has become a fundamental tool for many technical and business issues surrounding United Airlines maintenance and engineering departments," explains Rich Atkinson, one of United's Senior Staff Engineers. "We needed a database product that was robust, relational, easy to develop in, easy to customize for end-user use, and capable of wide-area distribution. FileMaker has met and exceeded these requirements, and has allowed considerable user autonomy."

FileMaker fills many roles within the engineering and maintenance departments -- documenting ongoing projects for aircraft and aircraft components and keeping track of legal documentation surrounding maintenance work, as well as tracking the many administrative functions necessary in a large scale corporate setting. For Rich, the most challenging task is the tracking of repair maintenance data for individual aircraft components. "Legacy systems primarily relied on paper maintenance records to keep track of repairs and configurations of parts," he recalls. A better, faster, more efficient system was clearly needed -- so Rich set to work. "In a few months, as an extra task on the side of my normal responsibilities," he relates, "I was able to build a system that involved bar-coding aircraft parts, associating critical data with the bar-code such as part number, serial number, 'new' dates, and so forth. I also created a module that captured shop repair visits including aircraft, removal date, removal station, removal reason, and so on, and then associated the work done at the shop visit. Finally, I created a module that tracked configuration about aircraft parts, keeping track of reliability modification accomplishments."

And the result?

"This set of tools has become instrumental for Engineering in tracking component performance, chronic failures, and overall reliability," says Rich. "This tool is critical for shop technicians as they can compare repairs for similar failure modes, track unit performance, track parts, and improve their warranty repair charge recapture, saving United millions of dollars."

Over 110,000 bar-coded units are being tracked through the FileMaker system, with over 260,000 shop repair visits and over 90,000 configuration records. Rich supervises 90 databases as part of the parts-tracking system, with more than a million records total. The databases are networked internally via TCP/IP and an increasing number are being distributed over United's intranet.

And Rich is delighted with the results. As he declares, "FileMaker has enabled high-quality user-developed solution, while minimizing the need for professional IS assistance."



Contact information

Contact Info for Customer:

Richard Atkinson
Senior Staff Engineer
United Airlines
650-634-5068
rich.atkinson@united.com
http://www.united.com


Filemaker Contact:

Kevin Mallon
Public Relations Manager
FileMaker Inc.
408-987-7227
kevin_mallon@filemaker.com
http://www.filemaker.com


Overview
  • Few things are more complex than a modern airliner -- except for the maintenance work needed to keep those planes in the air. At United Airlines, FileMaker Pro is part of an elaborate system for tracking many steps in this vital work.
Industry
  • Medium-Large Business
  • Travel/Hospitality