Tracing a Route to Better Recycling

Tracing a Route to Better Recycling

ecube CEO, Lee McConnellogue's latest thought piece.

It’s time for the industry to upgrade our back-to-birth tracing for parts. We’ve come across two new processes recently, which move on from the traditional paperwork that’s been around for decades. I started as an apprentice is 1996. Since then, not much has changed in how we keep records. We still have the same Form 1 or 8130 forms; with a Tracking number in the top right hand corner, a signature and stamp below.

The digital passport proof of concept is interesting. Aviation Week reported a proof of concept for digital product passports for cabin items. Airbus and traceability platform Circularise have been working with suppliers and an MRO to combine real and simulated product data for an Airbus A350-1000 cabin. In the test it enabled ‘comprehensive traceability from raw material sourcing to end-of-life disposal or reuse’.

No-one would say that a passport is not the right thing to do. But should that be on paper? Or even digital? As the industry has grown and the barriers to entry have lowered, the possibility of forgery has developed. As one colleague said to me the other day, increasingly the Form 1 is becoming to aviation what the fake driver’s licence is to underage party goers.

The aspiration has long been for a passport of some sort that takes the part back-to-birth. The reality is, it looks like we already have the technology and it’s ahead of the game.

We came across parts fingerprinting at the ASA AFRA 2024 Conference. Alitheon were talking about their new technology, which uses optical-AI to “see” the minute surface details of physical items. It then converts them into a unique mathematical identity; a fingerprint. With one image you can identify and trace your part. Their CEO has identified aviation, rightly, as an industry ‘where irrefutable identification of safety critical aircraft parts is critical’. He also says ‘True and accurate paperwork is at best a proxy and not evidence that the actual part is what you think it is’. Would this technology be useful for our industry.

Having a digital fingerprint would increase reuse of parts.. We aim to harvest  800-1500 parts per aircraft. For a few customers, who put extra effort in to trace the lower-valued parts , it can be as high as 2,000. But, tracing can be a costly and time consuming with  diminishing returns on tracking down a part’s provenance if the paperwork trail isn’t perfect

At our end of an aircraft’s life, we would like to see quick and easy through-life tracing. Something that shows us the back-to-birth of a part and the touch points throughout its life journey. We want to be able to see where a part was made, the date it was made and any key events relating to it.

This would make more parts in every aircraft reuseable. So we’re very interested in technology that brings down the cost of tracing, as this will make it possible to identify and reuse more parts.

I also believe this is our industries best hope of mitigating the risk of bogus parts. We’re an industry that is safety-focussed. But we all know that safety standards can be damaged quickly, and that affects the whole industry and its consumers. Could this new technology be a way to stop bogus parts from getting into the system? It could help to prevent scandals like AOG Technics, where it was stated that there was  ‘“compelling documentary evidence” for the  parts that had been sold without the requisite documentation’ by one of the many organisations taking legal action

So how do we make this change happen? We need the industry sectors that consume parts to start demanding a better through-life process. We need airlines, lessors, MROs to drive the change; I don’t think the OEMs and regulators will.

Our industry is worth protecting. The aircraft, engine and parts manufacturing industry is worth £34.5bn to the UK economy. Nothing is infallible forever, but tooling fingerprints is a good step forward.