Not a cloud in the sky: Microsoft solutions help produce flight manuals
Innovative technologies have transformed manufacturing in many ways, but sophistication doesn’t have to mean complexity. Jacqui Griffiths looks at how simplicity and consistency are being brought to crucial areas of the user experience.
Published: June 27, 2006
By Jacqui Griffiths
This article was originally published in Prime Magazine.
As consumers, many of us have become used to the ever-increasing array of sophisticated gadgets available. But as anybody who has ever battled to program a video recorder will know, sophistication can bring a complexity that is beyond the average user. New technologies arrive all the time, but the people using them remain human. To prevent mistakes and misunderstandings, they need simple processes and clear, consistent information.
This principle applies to every industry, but is perhaps most crucial in areas like aviation where a mistake at any stage of the process, from designing the plane to flying it, can compromise passenger safety. Innovative technologies can improve the performance of aircraft, but every plane also needs a raft of documentation that is clear, consistent, and complies with a growing number of international regulations. There is no room for the inaccurate or incomprehensible operations manual here.
At Dassault Aviation, the need to marry innovation with clarity is all in a day’s work. “Innovation has always been key,” says the company’s corporate secretary Jacques Pellas. “The Dassault Aviation information technology (IT) team and its partners [including Microsoft, Dassault Systèmes, and Sogitec] have always been able to innovate in a very regulated and security-oriented environment.”
 | In order to achieve innovation in the finished product [planes], we have to be able to innovate in terms of processes, technologies, and organization. |  | | Jacques Pellas
Dassault Aviation | |
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Take for example Dassault Aviation’s Falcon 7X aircraft. This latest model in the company’s internationally acclaimed Falcon line of business aircraft is the first fly-by-wire business jet and the first aircraft to be designed entirely in a virtual environment. By using computer-aided design, Dassault Aviation was able to make sure every aspect of the plane would work before going into manufacturing. Everybody involved in its production could walk around the virtual aircraft before any parts were made. The technical wizardry of the design process emphasizes and enables the apparent simplicity of the end product – an aircraft that has to be built without error.
But every aircraft must also have a significant amount of documentation, including the Airplane Flight Manual (AFM) and a range of guides describing procedures that pilots should use in different situations. Having minimized the risk of human error with the aircraft itself, Dassault Aviation needed to know that the range of flight manuals it produced for the Falcon 7X would be equally reliable while consistently meeting international certification requirements.
Flight manuals are structured documents that are not easy to write. The AFM is a comprehensive guide to procedures, while other manuals such as the Quick Reference Handbook are used onboard to summarize certain portions of it. As well as being 100 per cent accurate and up-to-date, these documents have to meet two strict requirements: they must adhere to a specific structure, and they must comply with documentary rules in order to be certified by international authorities. At Dassault Aviation, many technical writers are involved in their production.
The specialized software used to produce the manuals meant that each manual had to be produced separately by different individuals. Many tasks were unnecessarily duplicated because it was difficult to reuse content between different types of document. This type of inefficiency in working processes was frustrating for the writers and for the company. “We were using various tools to write the AFM and the procedural manuals,” says Alain Bianchina, knowledge management project director at Dassault Aviation. “It produced errors and it was very difficult to manage the modifications that we had to make to each of the manuals.”
The answer lay in Dassault Aviation’s willingness to embrace innovation in all areas. Jacques Pellas says: “In order to achieve innovation in the finished product (planes), we have to be able to innovate in terms of processes, technologies, and organization, in the context of regulations and security.” So the company decided to develop a more efficient method of producing the manuals. As well as developing new procedures, it needed to know that these would continue to work in the long term. “Our planes have a very long service life,” says Alain Bianchina. “This means that manuals have to be updated for many years running.”
And so Project FlightDoc, aimed at developing more accurate and efficient flight manual production processes, was born. The company chose to use XML and Microsoft Office Word 2003. As a standards-based text format, XML is both versatile and long-lived, while Office Word 2003 offers an interface that is familiar to every user.
With no need for training, this powerful combination of technologies is deceptively simple to the user. Dassault Aviation chose Microsoft to deliver an entry environment and tool for composing the documents. The company’s IT team and technical writers worked closely with Microsoft Services. The result was an efficient solution that would meet specific needs of IT workers and end users as well as those of the regulatory bodies. The common interface enabled a new process to be devised for producing the manuals. “Master document units” are now the building blocks for all the documents. These are comprised of modules that all the elements of a given procedure which are common to a certain type of manual. Instead of entering separate elements into the AFM, writers can access document units or modules containing relevant content, which can then be used across several different manuals.
Two tools have been developed to help the writers. The first is a composition and editing tool incorporated into the Office pane. The Document Type Definition (DTD) function formally sets out rules and standardized properties for the documentation, while context-specific help tells the writers exactly which type of object they can and cannot use in a particular area of the document. Because the XML structure is generated automatically, the writing process is much simpler than before. Following this, a publishing tool lets users filter and then assemble the document units to produce the manual.
The document unit filtering process defines the list of manuals relevant to each unit. The units are then clustered together in groups relating to each type of manual. The master document unit acts as a single reference point for each procedure—any changes need only to be made to this unit, and are then automatically applied across the relevant manuals. There is no need to re-enter material in each manual. Using the XML standard in Word 2003 makes sure that the documents are also standardized, guaranteeing their longevity.
Whatever occurs in the technological process, the use of a standard text format and familiar user interface keeps complexity behind the scenes. Manual production is simplified at the user’s end because writers can use the same tool to process text, write standard documents like e-mails and memos, and create every piece of aircraft documentation. Instead of having to negotiate a learning curve before getting up to speed, the writers found their work easier straightaway, and productivity increased.
“Editing text in XML format is never very easy,” says Alain Bianchina. “But Office 2003 makes it simple. This tool makes it easy for the people writing the flight manuals to navigate between the structure in XML and the content. The context-sensitive help in the Office pane is an enormous boon in their work and reduces the risk of error.”
Jacques Pellas agrees, adding, “The main benefit of this project is that it makes document creation, publication and configuration management easy, with reusable content.” Now, for example, if technical modifications are made to an aircraft, there is no need to rewrite the procedures in every single manual that needs updating. Only one section is rewritten, and all other relevant portions of the document are changed automatically. The wasted resources and risk of error entailed in multiple data entries is gone, and the company can have complete faith that the documents are accurate, consistent, and up-to-date.
Jacques Pellas and the Dassault Aviation IT team are impressed. “We’re very satisfied with the relationship we’ve established with Microsoft. It brings value to the IT and to the business of Dassault Aviation. The Microsoft solution has yielded a lot of value with maximum simplicity in the FlightDoc project in respect of delays and charges. This is a win-win partnership.”
The initial focus of Project FlightDoc is on documentation for the Falcon 7X. It seems fitting that this innovative document production process should be used to deliver the operating manuals for this flagship business plane. The entire range of Falcon planes will eventually be brought in under the wings of the project, entailing the production of 70 primary manuals totaling around 30,000 pages.
Project FlightDoc exemplifies an ideal partnership between people and technology. While innovative technologies continue to handle increasingly complex manufacturing tasks, they can also be used to make sure the human end of the process is simple, clear and productive. By simplifying the user experience, project FlightDoc has improved the accuracy of Dassault Aviation’s flight documentation and the experience of its writers. Looking ahead, Jacques Pellas promises, “This is just the start—the best is yet to come. We have more innovative ideas for improving flight documentation, working with Microsoft and historic partners like Dassault Systèmes and Sogitec.”
