Hungarian Air Ambulance is First Helicopter Operator to Fully Digitalise Support Operation With Airbus

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Airbus Helicopters is helping Hungary’s largest civilian operator become a digital organisation capable of capturing, storing and then analysing the rich amounts of data generated from its day-to-day helicopter operations.

The operator, Hungarian Air Ambulance Nonprofit Ltd, has signed a three-year contract to deploy Airbus Helicopters’ Connected Services for its new fleet of nine second-hand H135 helicopters, thereby digitising its entire chain of maintenance and flight operations. It is the first operator to purchase the complete end-to-end solution of connected services from Airbus, encompassing the digitisation, collection, storage, and analysis of data.

“As our operation grows in terms of fleet size, and with the opening of a new base, we aim in parallel to put in place all the bricks of a data-driven organisation, so that we can begin harnessing and learning from our data all along our operational chain, from the pilot to the maintenance technician,” said Dr. Laszlo Gorove, CEO of the Hungarian Air Ambulance.

“Every time an engine starts and with every beat of a rotor blade, a wealth of valuable data streams out of a helicopter,” said Christoph Zammert, Executive Vice President of Customer Support & Services at Airbus Helicopters. “By digitising the processes and tools used to manage Hungarian Air Ambulance’s maintenance, logistics and flight operations, and then applying analytics, we expect our customer will save time, improve data quality and processes, increase fleet availability, enhance operational safety and optimise costs.”

Under this new contract, Hungarian Air Ambulance will roll out the core group of digital services: the Fleet Keeper digital technical logbook; the new Flightastic digital pilot logbook and compliance monitoring system; Airbus’ homegrown Fleet Master maintenance information system (for small and medium-sized operators); and digital log cards, which trace the entire maintenance history of a single component.

"The daily routine checks our crew performs with tablets will be made even more thorough with these additions,” said Akos Boros, electronic flight bag administrator and documentation engineer at Hungarian Air Ambulance.

These tools will enable the emergency medical services operator to convert its data into an easy-to-use digital format, which can then be exploited using data analytics. One of these analytics is Flight Analyser, for which Hungarian Air Ambulance becomes the first customer. Flight Analyser analyses flight data to prevent risky incidents that could have led to accidents.

Today more than 1,000 helicopters are connected to Airbus Helicopters. These include almost every helicopter type in Airbus’ range—H125s, H130s, H145s, H155s, H175s, H215s, and H225s—performing a wide variety of missions including emergency medical services (EMS), public services, tourism, training, private and business aviation, offshore energy and search and rescue.