"Who's Got the Doohickey That Fits into the Thingamabob?"

Air Canada is Canada's largest airline. Its 234 planes make an average of 1600 flights per day, 40 per cent of which travel through the airline's Toronto hub. The weakened economy and the aftershocks of the 9/11 hijackings have ravaged the North American airline industry, and Air Canada is no exception. From an operational perspective, says vice president of IT and CIO Alice Keung, the downturn has forced the airline to look for ways to improve aircraft utilisation, which means keeping planes in the air and off the ground. "With a shorter turnaround time [between flights] you can use the aircraft more frequently," she says. "This leads both to more profitability and improved customer service."

The number-one culprit for ground delays is line maintenance - unscheduled repairs to a plane's equipment, instruments or body. (That is different from heavy maintenance, in which planes can be stripped down to the wires. Heavy maintenance is conducted at scheduled intervals in either Calgary, Montreal, Vancouver or Winnipeg.)

Here's how line maintenance works: a pilot or mechanic sends an alert to Toronto - by teletype, fax or simply with a note in the plane's log - saying that a plane needs repairs. When the plane lands in Toronto, mechanics meet it. Or they don't.

Sometimes the mechanics don't get the message, or they don't get it until after the plane has left. All too frequently, a mechanic arrives at the gate only to realise that he has to return to the hangar for a part. So Keung figured that if mechanics had real-time access to the maintenance system, they would be better prepared to service the plane when it arrived. That would mean faster turnaround.

Keung is a wireless sceptic, but after conversations with other Toronto-area wireless users - including the local police force and the Toronto Bluejays baseball team - she concluded that "we needed it whether we liked it or not". So in April 2001 Air Canada invested $US254,000 in a pilot project to see whether wireless could in fact improve maintenance efficiency.

Air Canada mechanics needed to access information, including maintenance manuals, diagrams and as many as 10 different data systems, and Keung realised early on that devices connected through a wireless carrier's data network wouldn't have the necessary bandwidth. Furthermore, overhauling back-end systems to make them accessible would be prohibitively expensive. Instead, Keung deployed a wireless LAN-based solution, investing in complex encryption and authentication technologies that would keep it secure.

What devices to use was another unknown. "We tried a few," says Keung. "We started with a handheld device, but the mechanics didn't like it. They have to wear huge gloves in the winter" - this is Air Canada after all - "and the number of data sources and diagrams made handhelds way too small." Eventually, with help from IBM, Keung developed a tablet-like device that could be mounted on a mechanic's truck. During the five-month pilot, Air Canada found that productivity improved. Mechanics didn't have to travel back and forth to the hangar as much, and it was easier to plan for repairs. If a plane heading for Vancouver needed a widget, management could make sure the widget would be there, waiting. "That all has a bottom-line impact," Keung says. She believes that the pilot made a (modest) contribution to Air Canada's 2002 $US134 million second-quarter operating income increase over 2001's second quarter.

It was, in fact, the only North American-based international carrier to post a quarterly profit.

The next step, says Keung, will be to roll out the devices gradually to Air Canada terminals in other cities.