COMLUX, a leading business aviation service provider, came to Boeing with the challenge to help their customer, a private aircraft owner with a 787-8 they had just acquired from a secondary market, ready the airplane for entry into service.
As their first priority, the unnamed VVIP jet owner, who is also a type-rated 787 pilot, wanted to have the airplane certified and ready to fly as quickly as possible and to support planned humanitarian aid flights.
The COMLUX team requested training support and advice from Boeing. Adding to the challenge in working a plan to prepare the airplane for entry into service was the need to complete this effort while working in a virtual environment, due to COVID-19 restrictions.
Several Boeing teams jumped into action, including the Aviation Business Solutions team that routinely works with airlines and other airplane operators to analyze data and processes, and find the right solutions to improve efficiency in airplane operations.
An important element of preparing the airplane for transition involved “e-enabling” the customer operation, i.e., integrating the airplane into ground-based support systems. This also included transitioning data from the airplane and configuring it properly to its new on-ground information management network. This was not an easy task, and working in a fully virtual environment made it even more difficult.
“Because of COVID and international travel restrictions, this was a special situation where very complex engineering and airplane certification preparations and support had to be provided via detailed step by step instructions on virtual meetings and conference calls,” said Paul Woods, Aviation Business Solutions Managing Director. “Typically, we would have our engineers on site working side by side with the customer. In this situation, however, the customer had to send us screen shots of the airplane to help them troubleshoot issues. The Boeing team worked several long nights and weekends to complete the work.”
