McLarens Aviation (formerly Airclaims), is a leading aviation loss adjusting business serving the global insurance market. Whilst claims management is around 80% of the business, our Risk and Asset Management division continues to grow extensively year on year. This growth is primarily driven from a need by our clients for increased levels of external resource support, as part of business improvement initiatives and cost reduction objectives. Our clients include aircraft operators, lessors, financiers and Oil, Gas and Mining companies. They turn to us for a number of solutions, including Pre-Purchase inspections / valuations, lease reviews, aircraft delivery / redelivery / transition management, Continuing Airworthiness Management services and independent operational and technical risk audits.

McLarens Aviation is a Continuing Airworthiness Management Organization (CAMO) approved by the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) in accordance with Part M, Subpart G and I (ARC) requirements. We are approved to provide these services on over 30 different aircraft types from the major manufacturers and offer a full suite of CAMO services to support private aircraft owners, commercial operators, financiers and leasing companies.

The range of aircraft and the scope of regulation grow ever more complex, some aspects of flying and maintaining commercial aircraft are increasingly demanding, therefore, appropriately trained and approved personnel together with suitable maintenance control software, is essential in providing safe, efficient and compliant airworthiness management. In this article, we will review the requirements of a CAMO and the Commsoft OASES I.T system.

Why do we need CAMO? The short answer is ‘EU’ regulation and compliance. However, regulation aside, the goal is to safely maintain, monitor and control the serviceability and airworthiness of an aircraft. The operational and maintenance life of an aircraft is subject to strict regulation, therefore, a suitable maintenance control platform, that is user friendly, reactive and helps to ensure that all the mandatory, essential, routine and regulatory elements of an aircraft life are managed is essential.

Commsoft OASES overview 

To support McLarens Aviation CAMO function, we elected to acquire Commsoft’s OASES (Open Aviation Strategic Engineering System) package after a thorough review of market options, as the solution was the closest to meet our overall needs particularly in terms of functionality and scalability given our consultancy role, with many aircraft transitioning on and off of our CAMO at any one time. OASES is considered to be a highly effective aviation engineering and maintenance system. Easy to use with a wealth of features, it fully meets the needs of both major airlines and independent CAMO organizations.  A key function of the OASES package is that it comprehensively supports the need for compliance management. There are a number of essential requirements and regulations that users need to follow to maintain the airworthiness of an aircraft in a controlled environment. OASES supports this requirement and is able to control of all aspects of maintaining the airworthiness of aircraft, from the daily check through to the base maintenance input and airworthiness directives and service bulletin control. The control and monitoring of non-mandatory information, modifications and repairs is also processed and managed as part of the integrated functions.

In addition to the airworthiness management elements, OASES has a comprehensive inventory, stores and procurement portal, which can be used as part of a fully auditable and effective business process tool.

An illustration of I.T platform compliance, Control and Auditing is demonstrated in figure 1 below:

Commsoft OASES in action
A number of our CAMO team have used OASES in previous roles with airlines such as British Midland International (BMI), BA City Flyer and BAe Systems. McLarens Aviation has over 5 years’ experience with OASES and we have been impressed with the multifunctional nature and ease with which we can control, access and run reports. The ability to search data by a variety of fields such as part number, aircraft type, fleet, ATA chapter and produce relevant records confirms the usability of the product.

There are always the key issues of safety, therefore, pilot reporting systems (PIREPS) is a very useful mechanism which allows users to set their parameters to highlight any technical or maintenance issues occurring and (or) recurring.

Importantly, the system works in real-time and promotes a proactive rather than reactive approach to airworthiness oversight. Having managed aircraft based in Asia, Eastern Europe and South America, the ability to remotely manage customer fleets using high speed internet for real-time processing has been key to our business and the needs of our customers.

As a full service technical consultancy, the OASES package offers us a cost-effective lifecycle management tool that interacts and supports the needs of our lessor and lessee sector clients and the core services that we provide. (see figure 2)

Figure 2