By Staff Correspondent
Anand Bhaskar, MD & CEO, Air Works Group, addressed some key aviation industry requirements for the future during the Aero MRO India 2022 event.
He started off by insisting on a need to focus on quality workmanship, operational excellence, and productivity in the field. He laid emphasis on safety, too. Bhaskar said that all of these are “things in which the world is watching us. One wrong step here, and we’ll get beaten down on this.” He stated that safety has to be paramount and operational excellence, productivity, and quality need to become top areas of attention.
The CEO also spoke about the need to leverage on the country’s advantage in terms of information technology. “That is something we should capitalise on. We have all heard of data analytics, robotics, chatbot, NLP, and 3D printing. These are not statements or phrases foreign to aviation or aviation sector in the country.”
Speaking of Air Works use of data analytics, he said his company has put in a system “where the 400 to 800-900 task card you do on a particular fee check is all digitised and available to the customer to all the stakeholders at the click of a button.”
He further added that they can find out which task cards have opened, the challenges in closing them, the pending rotatable, the inventories in the pipeline, and the sequencing on those task cards. It is an excellent tool available to all stakeholders, so they can plan things better.
“We talk about chatbots and NLPs. Again, with the 5G advent, a profound change will happen, and we should be at the forefront of this change. What is a chatbot? A chatbot is any tool, whether it is WhatsApp or Teams; by simply putting a query, you can find where the inventory is available across any location in the country. My engineer can set a particular part number on WhatsApp, and he should be able to find out in the 26 locations across the country where that part is available. That is the power of the IT revolution that we can bring into,” he further noted on the subject of technological advances.
Bhaskar said that at Air works, they are at a very initial stage of integrating robotics into their functioning. At their biggest center in Bengaluru, the Silicon Valley of India, the company has tied up with some of the biggest names in the IT sphere, “and we are looking at how to use robotics for aircraft painting to reduce the time from the requisition of a part from a technician to final delivery,” Bhaskar said about the significance of robotics and its growth potential.
He talked about other tools that the company is utilising in order to be future-ready. Air Works has tied up with the design organisation for 3D printing. He said that the company wants “to bring that in and ensure that we should be able to support both defence and commercial [aviation] on some of these parts.”
Speaking about the help required from the government, Bhaskar highlighted one big aspect: regulations. He emphasised the need for mutual recognition of DGCA with FAA and EASA. “Across various geography, it is happening, and it is high time we do a DGCA conversion with the FAA and EASA. That will remove inefficiencies in the system and make compliance very robust,” Bhaskar stressed.
“Next is a mindset issue that I am requesting. It is a shift of compliance accountability to the market operator. Stop using a stick, but let us do the compliance accountability; make us accountable, and we will deliver to the standard,” he highlighted offering a way forward.
