SwRI Builds Digital Lifecycle System for Aging Air Force Aircraft

Some of the aircraft in the U.S. military fleet were designed before digital recordkeeping existed in any meaningful form. Their design drawings are on paper or in early electronic formats. Their maintenance histories are scattered across filing cabinets, spreadsheets, databases of different vintages, and the institutional memories of mechanics who have since retired. Making sound engineering decisions about these aircraft - predicting when components will fail, scheduling maintenance before problems become dangerous, assessing the structural impact of operational history - requires pulling information together that was never meant to be integrated.

Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) is building a system to do exactly that for the U.S. Air Force Academy. The Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) system will consolidate decades of scattered records into a single structured digital environment and will be designed to work with the analytical tools Air Force engineers already use.

The Scattered Records Problem

"Many legacy aircraft were designed and maintained long before digital recordkeeping was common, so design, usage and maintenance documentation is scattered across many formats and locations," said SwRI Senior Research Engineer Martin Raming, who leads the project. "Our goal is to create a central, structured digital system for all of that information."

The challenge is both technical and logistical. Technical, because integrating records in disparate formats and from disparate eras requires standardization decisions that affect how information can later be queried and analyzed. Logistical, because the records exist in multiple physical locations, belong to different organizational units, and were created by different contractors and government offices over many decades.

The PLM system will be built using existing commercial software rather than custom development, reducing both cost and the risk of creating another proprietary format that becomes obsolete. The choice of established software also facilitates integration with Air Force analysis tools already in use - structural analysis programs, fatigue assessment tools, inspection scheduling software.

Prognosis-Based Maintenance

The term "prognostic engineering" describes a shift from reactive maintenance (fix it when it breaks) and scheduled maintenance (service it at regular intervals regardless of condition) to predictive maintenance - using data, modeling, and analytics to identify when specific components are approaching the point of failure before that failure occurs.

For aircraft, this has direct safety and cost implications. A structural crack that propagates undetected can cause catastrophic failure; finding it at an early stage allows a less invasive repair. Components replaced on fixed schedules may be pulled from service with significant useful life remaining, wasting money. Components left in service past their optimal replacement point may fail unexpectedly, requiring expensive emergency maintenance or grounding the aircraft.

"A PLM system will allow us to make more precise prognosis-based engineering decisions," Raming explained. "Being proactive on that level increases safety and allows the military to save money on aircraft maintenance by fixing problems before they become expensive failures."

Traceability and Digital Twins

A key design feature of the PLM system is full traceability. All analyses performed within the system are linked to a specific version of an aircraft model or component definition, so engineers revisiting a previous analysis can see exactly what data it was based on. When aircraft are modified, when wear patterns emerge, or when new engineering understanding changes how a component should be assessed, the system preserves the analytical history rather than overwriting it. This creates an auditable record that supports both safety oversight and legal accountability.

The longer-term objective is digital twin development. A digital twin is a virtual replica of a physical system - in this case, an individual aircraft - that incorporates the aircraft's specific design, operational history, maintenance record, and current condition. Rather than treating all aircraft of a given type as identical, a digital twin captures the individuality that accumulates through actual use. SwRI will collaborate with Siemens Government Technologies on this effort.

Digital twins are not a near-term deliverable of this project. Building the PLM system is the foundational step that makes digital twins achievable - without centralized, structured, reliable data, a digital twin is a concept with no substrate.

Scope and Context

SwRI has worked with U.S. military aviation programs on structural monitoring, inspection methods, and aging aircraft management for decades. The current project extends that relationship into the domain of data infrastructure - addressing not just how to analyze aircraft condition, but how to organize the information that analysis requires. The project is scoped to the U.S. Air Force Academy and addresses specific aircraft types within that institution's inventory; whether and how the system architecture might be extended to other Air Force or military aviation programs is not specified in current announcements.