Customer Success Story: Delta Air Lines

Ken Lorow, Manager, TechOps Technology & Innovations, Engineering from Delta Airlines, explains how Descartes RFID technology is helping the air carrier manage equipment and inventory as well as keep pace with compliance requirements. Watch the video below or read the transcript to learn more.

"My name is Ken Lorow from Delta Airlines. I’ve been working here for 37.5 years. 10 to 12 years ago, I had the opportunity to work with Dave Brown and his team from Aerospace Software Development (ASD), so I just recently became a customer of Descartes. In 2013, we began a process of tagging our aircraft wheels. If anybody's ever heard of ‘Snowmageddon’ in Atlanta, that was the day that it shut down Atlanta, and Dave and I were freezing in the middle of a concourse. There was no sunshine, [we were] freezing tagging wheels, and we turned around and realized we were locked in and snowed in, and that began the journey with ASD.”

“They came back with a product and said yes, here you go, what do you think of this? And, that's exactly what I wanted. That's our partnership, that's where we've been, and it's been a long time and a lot of different things that we've done at Delta Airlines since that time. We started with the wheels.”

“On the logistics side of the house, that was kind of self-serving, but a very easy [usecase] to track parts. [The solution] ties into the tool system knowing where the parts are, such as the circuit breaker collars. If you lose one, you're able to use RFID to locate it. And so that's lockout tag out. Kanban are expendable material, and it matters that you have a big $200,000 computer and you need to know where it is. That's great, but a 50-cent washer could also cause an aircraft to be delayed. Every part is critical to the operation of an airplane. If you don't have that 50-cent washer, that matters also, and that could cause a shut down or cause a delay.”

“Also, for Kanban, there's a bin flag that allows you to flip a flag that says I need to order these parts. In the past, you'd have to go around, write it on a piece of paper, say I'm out of this, and then go order it. This was upgraded to barcode scans, but if there wasn't a human to do these barcode scans, then you were without parts for a long time.”

“Now, with RFID, you can flip a flag. It sends up a signal or just turns orange and says, I need to order these parts. You can walk in a room, and in 30-seconds to 2-minutes, depending on the size of that area, [the technology] automatically orders the parts, gets those parts back into the pipeline, and gets them on-site a lot faster.”

“We also have composite material that is regulated where compliance matters. When you talk about emergency equipment, it's not about just knowing that you have a life vest, it's about knowing that you have a life vest that's compliant, that it’s within regulations, and within the expiration date. For oxygen generators, in the time of an emergency when you are at an elevation where you need an oxygen mask, when that oxygen mask deploys, you want to know that the oxygen generator is going to create oxygen. There’s an expiration date on these oxygen generators, so compliance and safety will be the theme that continues to happen and why we do things that we do with RFID.”

“Speaking of composite material, when we do repairs on an aircraft, you have to use a certain material. The material is very expensive, and it has to stay in the freezer for a long period of time. When it's out of the freezer to thaw out, so you can cut a piece off of it to make a repair on a wing or on a rudder, it can only be out and thawed a certain amount of time. It’s a very manual process to say I've taken this roll [of material] out, I've manually put it over here, and I know I'm tracking it, and then I put it back in the freezer. When you forget to update when you put it back in the freezer, being very conservative and safe, if we're not sure of the time frame, we'll destroy that roll of composite material and we'll order another one.”

“There's a lead time that goes with that, and there's also the amount of the money that is spent on the composite. So now with the Descartes product, we're using [the material] and again and again. The solution allows us to track it as soon as it comes into the room. Within a 2-minute time frame, it starts tracking the time out. As soon as it goes back in the freezer, within 2-minutes, it tracks the time out of the freezer. This saves us a lot of money and makes sure the material that we're using on board our aircraft is safe and it's compliant. These are some of the use cases that we're using with [the technology].”

“We work together as a partnership, and we have a very good community in the RFID space around the Descartes ASD's product.  It's the shared knowledge that we have amongst our teams that works so well for us. In the future, there's so many opportunities ahead of us, whether it's engine shop tracking, component shop tracking, engine stand tracking, or BLE— it’s exciting for us for future use cases.”

“When I started hearing about BLE I'm like, wow, this is really cool. We could start merging these technologies like RFID have Bluetooth that could talk together in one system. That is my vision of ‘where's my stuff’, having a dashboard where one day I'll be able to say where something is, whether it's tracked with BLE, or if it's tracked with RFID.”

“I'm excited about where Descartes takes us in the future of BLE and RFID. Down the path, this opens up more and more opportunities for Delta Airlines. There are a lot of creative minds that work at Delta Airlines that can think of how Descartes can help, and how Delta can partner with Descartes going forward. I'm pretty excited about the very near future and the long-term future working with Descartes.”

Ken Lorow, Manager, TechOps Technology & Innovations, Engineering, Delta Airlines

Headquartered in Atlanta, Delta operates significant hubs and key markets in Amsterdam, Atlanta, Bogota, Boston, Detroit, Lima, London-Heathrow, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Minneapolis-St. Paul, New York-JFK and LaGuardia, Paris-Charles de Gaulle, Salt Lake City, Santiago (Chile), Sao Paulo, Seattle, Seoul-Incheon and Tokyo.

As the leading global airline, Delta's mission to connect the world creates opportunities, fosters understanding and expands horizons by connecting people and communities to each other and to their own potential.

Learn more at www.delta.com