Aircraft records digitization provider Bluetail has added the Bluetail Fleet platform, which helps aircraft operators access fleet data to simplify records management and facilitate regulatory compliance. The platform has been under development for more than six months, and customers have tested it for 30 to 40 days before today’s launch.

After starting the company five years ago, initially to scan and store aircraft records, Bluetail has added other data-related services, including this new platform developed for Part 91 and 135 fleet operators. Bluetail Fleet builds on the earlier Conformity module that Bluetail offered but didn’t fully meet customers’ needs. 

“Our customers wanted broader compliance features,” said Roberto Guerrieri, Bluetail co-founder and CEO. Now Bluetail Fleet offers not just the ability to organize, access, and manage aircraft records and produce compliance reports, but also quick access to information needed for Part 135 conformity, pre-purchase inspections, and ATA chapters 4 and 5 airworthiness compliance. This can greatly speed up auditing processes and provides an easy way to supply required information to FAA inspectors, maintenance providers, and parties involved in aircraft transactions. Bluetail estimates that using its services can save up to 50% of the time spent on a typical pre-purchase inspection.

“The problem we see today is that operators dig through thousands of PDFs to prepare for an audit of conformity or pre-purchase inspection,” said Bluetail product manager Rachel Taylor. “They might have great records, but there’s no easy way to manage, track, and search them. It becomes even harder when you have multiple projects going on at once.”

The new platform, she added, “helps turn Bluetail into a compliance and research tool. So you can set up a project, bulk import a list of items, and start instantly searching your records for the [applicable] documents. It’s fast, it’s organized, and it gives you a clear view of what’s found and what’s still missing.”

Bluetail Fleet starts users at a dashboard that summarizes in-process and completed projects, by aircraft. Each project is customizable beyond five templates that are most commonly used for records-based research—for example, a pre-purchase inspection. Once the user selects the information needed for the project, it builds a list of other information that may be needed to fulfill the project’s requirements. For a pre-purchase inspection, it might be necessary to upload airworthiness directives from the FAA’s Dynamic Regulatory System website, plus documents from the aircraft’s logbooks. Items can be bulk-added or imported from a list.

Once the research is done, the user can add information to supplement the records, such as airworthiness directive or service bulletin compliance times and dates. When everything is complete, the report can be printed either in sections or as a complete report.

The user can configure the report to include or leave out certain information, depending on who will receive the report. Bluetail remembers this configuration information so it doesn’t have to be entered every time a report is prepared for printing and sharing.

“Sharing would be the ability to give this to people who are external to Bluetail,” Taylor explained. “They don’t have login credentials. They get a link in an email and have the ability to view just that report, but they don’t have the ability to log in and see everything else. We also have the ability to set that with an expiration date. It’s ideal for anyone who wants a repeatable digital process for something that’s always been manual.”

“Imagine doing this all on paper,” said Guerrieri. “You’d have binders all over the table. You’d be pulling out stuff, scanning them, then scanning a second copy to build some of these reports. Now it can be all done within Bluetail. We’re moving away from just records management to workflows and into the future.”

Kent Pickard, Bluetail’s chief technology officer, pointed out that once an aircraft’s documents are uploaded into Bluetail, they are available for multiple uses, not just a one-time conformity. “To my knowledge, this is the only tool that allows you to deeply integrate your single source of truth documentation in terms of what defines the compliance for your aircraft,” he said. That makes Bluetail Fleet useful for audits or to carry on the aircraft to be ready for ramp checks or European SAFA inspections. “There are a lot of use cases,” he said.

For customers worried about ownership of the data that is stored in Bluetail, Guerrieri emphasized that it belongs to the customer, even after they cancel their subscription. Records for an aircraft can also be transferred to a new owner. “The person who owns the airplane owns the data,” he said. “We were tired of hearing, ‘We can’t get data out of our maintenance-tracking system.’ You have to have the owners own the data, and you can do what you want to do with it. We’re a service provider to make their lives easier.

“The movement to digital transformation is not just for aircraft records,” he added. “We used to have to evangelize about digital transformation…from an efficiency standpoint. With the massive labor shortages, [especially] maintenance teams, now we have initiatives to get digital in all areas.”

The new Bluetail Fleet features are part of a higher-tier subscription and not a standalone feature.