RFID is taking off in commercial aviation and defense

Last week, I wrote about the renewed energy I’m seeing in the industrial RFID space.

For one, there is strong sustainable growth in a resurgent market, according to ABI Research’s Mike Liard.

For another, vendors are telling me about a new round of innovative products they’re bringing to market. 

The third leg of that stool, of course, is adoption. A few weeks ago, I had a chance to interview a number of companies adopting RFID in the MRO side of the commercial aviation and defense industries for Aviation Week’s Overhaul & Maintenance.

It was a glimpse into an industry MMH doesn’t normally see. It’ll come as no surprise that end-to-end visibility is the goal for RFID in the aviation industry, just as it’s the goal in the retail supply chain. Big aircraft manufacturers like Boeing, Airbus and Lockheed Martin envision being able to read all of the components installed on a newly-manufactured aircraft as it rolls through an RFID portal while leaving a hanger.

At the same time, everyone understands that vision is still a flight of fancy. Instead of trying to track every part across the supply chain, these early initiatives are focused on finding a solution to address a specific pain point and deliver a return on investment (ROI). Here’s what was really interesting: By focusing on pain points, each came up with a different starting point for the implementation of RFID technology, based on the bottlenecks in their operations.

Boeing, for instance, has been working with Japan Airlines to check the expiration dates on oxygen canisters stored in the ceilings of an airliner. Right now, it takes two individuals more than six hours each to visually inspect all of the canisters on a single plane. Attach an RFID tag encoded with an expiration date to the canisters, and that same task can be completed in less than 10 minutes.

Airbus, meanwhile, is tagging the totes used to deliver parts to its final assembly area in Hamburg, Germany. Here’s the math: It takes about 750 containers of parts to complete an aircraft. Each of those totes can be delivered to one of six docks; each dock has two elevators (one on either side of the plane under construction); and each elevator has four floors. An RFID reader notifies an operator delivering totes if he tries to get on the wrong elevator or get off at the wrong floor.

At a 1 million square foot repair facility in Greenville, S.C., Lockheed Martin is applying RFID tags to incoming parts as they arrive at the gate. Those tags are then read when parts hit the docks. While most parts are simply going to be put away into storage, the inventory management system is also programmed to identify critical parts needed to keep the line going somewhere else on the campus. Those parts are highlighted for receivers on the dock; at the same time, an alert lets the workers in the area where the parts are needed know that help is on the way. Lockheed says it can usually deliver those hot items within 30 minutes.

Those kinds of examples come as no surprise to Mike Liard. “The byproduct, and the fun, of compliance technology is that we’re now talking about RFID in all kinds of spaces, like MRO and vehicle identification,” Liard says. “There is no cookie-cutter model and each application and user is inherently unique.”