Whether a maintenance procedure is actually doable — whether the hand fits in there, whether the tool can turn, whether the part comes out — cannot be fully settled at a desk. Traditionally it is checked against CAD models and, often, physical mock-ups.
What they did
Airbus moved the verification and validation step for maintenance operations into virtual reality. The engineer tries the procedure at full scale in a virtual environment; access, sequencing and tool clearance are checked against the real model. Airbus says the system takes a day to learn.
The measured result
- Verification and validation activities take just 25% of the time needed for traditional CATIA and DMU methods
- Learning to use the system takes one day
Claims circulating for this case — “25% shorter training”, “40% higher accuracy”, “50% less aircraft-on-ground time” — appear nowhere in Airbus’s publication. The 25% Airbus reports is about validation time, not training time.
What it means for a manufacturer
Trying a service procedure virtually before writing it down avoids learning in the field that “a hand does not reach that bolt”. Once the procedure itself is validated, the training built on it stands on solid ground.