As a European Part-M operator, KLM Cityhopper was required to track chronic (repeat) aircraft defects, a responsibility subcontracted, as a CAMO organization, to Regional Jet Center, their MRO. The process relied on manually reviewing ATA and sub-ATA coding in the airline’s AMOS maintenance system — accurate only if every code had been checked and corrected by hand, and even then it surfaced only defects that were already known and correctly tagged. The tool that had supported this process was also discontinued by its manufacturer, forcing KLM Cityhopper to look for an alternative.
The volume of data made the problem worse. As the fleet grew and diversified, manually analyzing every ATA chapter for repeat defects took several hours and depended on the operational tempo of the fleet. The workload became unsustainable: the airline was forced to stop manual repeat-defect tracking on ATA 25 — the chapter covering cabin equipment and passenger comfort. With no fleet-wide, real-time visibility into which defects were recurring, and two-thirds of outstations offering no Embraer support, undetected chronic defects carried a direct risk of AOGs, delays, and cancellations.
KLM Cityhopper wanted to improve fleet availability and on-time departure and, ultimately, reduce costs related to unscheduled ground time and operational disturbances.
After a market evaluation of available tools, KLM Cityhopper trialed Veryon Defect Analysis and went live in mid-2018. Defect Analysis automatically pulls data from AMOS near real-time and, powered by Veryon AIRE, applies Natural Language Processing (NLP) models across pilot and maintenance reports to surface chronic-defect candidates — including cases that span multiple ATA chapters and defects described using aircraft-specific synonyms, such as “NLG” for nose landing gear. Every candidate defect appears on a single, color-coded dashboard — red for AOG situations, yellow or orange where an MEL applies, green for passenger-convenience issues — with filters that let engineers track whether an item is on monitor, has an open work order, or has been escalated.
In one specific instance, KLM Cityhopper noticed a recurring chronic defect related to pump leakage and their shop was able to determine that metal debris coming off the teeth of one component in the pump was causing damage on the seal, which in turn caused the leak. This information was shared directly with the pump manufacturer who, at the time of this writing, are working on an improved version to prevent these failures.
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