Collaboration technology impaction on flightline maintenance

In flightline maintenance, collaboration is an important factor in the maintainerpsilas quest to complete a difficult or unusual repair. When the aircraft maintenance intuitive troubleshooting (AMIT) research project design team was evaluating collaboration technologies to incorporate within the AMIT job performance aid (JPA), three questions kept coming to mind. First, what is truly needed? Second, what will improve performance? Thirdly, what would the end user prefer? To obtain these answers, the research team hosted several aircraft maintenance user group (AMUG) sessions and design consideration tests (DCTs) to identify both user preferences and performance issues associated with various collaborative tools that could be used in the flightline maintenance arena. Based on the results of this work, the team selected a text-based messaging system to embed in the final AMIT interface. The text-based system was a simple, yet effective method to solve many collaboration issues in flightline maintenance. The AMIT team then embarked on a 4 month constrained field test of the final AMIT JPA prototype at Luke Air Force Base to measure performance improvements between current processes (Without-AMIT) and future processes (With-AMIT). The purpose of this paper is to discuss and analyze the results of the collaboration segment of the field test.