Codename 'TRUEngine:' GE Aviation and Microsoft Reveal Aircraft Parts Certification Blockchain

GE Aviation, which supplies jet engines to about 60% of the global airline industry, has built a supply chain track and trace blockchain with the help of Microsoft Azure.

GE Aviation Digital Group aims to share the blockchain, a self-built derivative of ethereum, across an industry-wide consortium of partners.

The ledger's use case, which is about monitoring and collating data tied to the manufacture and life cycle of critical aircraft engine parts, could scarcely be more pertinent given the recent travails of Boeing.

"Our vision is being able to trace parts as they are manufactured and the engine when it's shipped. Then how that engine performs in the field, when to repair it and then re-enter it into the field."

While GE Aviation sells aircraft engines to commercial airlines and the military, GE Aviation Digital Group is a business unit within that which employs some 700 staff globally and sells software externally to the industry.

"If you think about it, a quality event in the aircraft engine industry is catastrophic. And to research that takes months of manual time. Driving efficiencies, accountability, and visibility into the process of making an engine will make us all safer."

Aircraft engines are liquid assets: over a five year period, some 60% of them change hands, making documentation and certifications important.

Part of the process involves customers like Delta or British Airways, for example, maintaining flight history records of how many cycles they have flown on each part, data which are then returned to GE Aviation so that the appropriate parts are replaced in a timely manner.

Walker of Microsoft added: "So what we have done brings cost optimization and significant safety improvement, but now we are exposing a new business model. We are creating a profit center for what I lovingly referred to as 'the boneyard' in Texas, where essentially they put all these parts where they don't have the GE Aviation genuine paperwork - and you can do that for all the other boneyards out there too."

"We are targeting companies who have already bought our engines - so it could be Delta or Southwest or BA - and they have a maintenance contract with us. We have a kind of razor and blades business model where we sell you the engine and then you will sign a maintenance agreement to be TRUEngine certified and we will maintain that; so we are rolling this out to our maintenance agreement base."