5 Reasons You Can’t Live Without Ames for Aircraft Maintenance Planning

When it comes to maintenance planning of your fleet, proper scheduling, compliance, efficiency, and overall reduction of aircraft downtime are key to minimizing the immense financial impact aircraft maintenance can have on an airline.

That’s also why having industry-tested maintenance planning tools and software on hand is paramount for keeping fleets up in the air and remaining competitive. OMEGA Advanced Planning & Scheduling built AMES (Aircraft Maintenance Event Scheduler) to do exactly that. Our browser-based airline maintenance software features a suite of specialized smart tools that guide decision-making and optimize your aircraft maintenance for improved aircraft availability.

To give a better idea of the benefits AMES offers leading airlines (including United, Delta, and British Airways, and others), here are 5 reasons you can’t live without AMES for aircraft maintenance planning.

Modernization + Automation

Traditional adhoc aircraft maintenance and planning software tools don’t cut it in 2021. The ancient model of scheduling maintenance by reacting to everyday events (rather than relying on a proactive plan based on requirements) is frequently the cause for the underutilization of aircraft, labor, and facilities and the overscheduling of maintenance and disruption to airlines’ production cycles.

This general deficiency and lack of scheduling automation (and extreme hit to available resources and revenue) is exactly why many airlines are switching to AMES. As traditional maintenance and planning tools (even basic spreadsheets) become obsolete, airlines continue to fall behind competitors using more sophisticated, automated tools like ours.

AMES’ goal-seeking planning and scheduling system forecasts, optimizes, and automates aircraft maintenance planning. It does this by taking in immense amounts of data to create future projections with unlimited “what-if” scenarios (such as last-minute changes), so airlines can properly optimize and auto-populate their maintenance schedules to retain fleet flexibility and increase revenue.

With OMEGA’s AMES software, you can:

Buffer production from the dynamics of the environment.
Identify future periods of excess demand and excess capacity.
Create unlimited “what-if” scenarios and provide alternative schedules without disrupting maintenance operations.
Predict the future and match fleet availability to market demand.
Make the best use of your assets.

Click here to learn more about AMES, the only fleet maintenance scheduling solution that can help you predict the future.

Better Reporting Tools

Reporting doesn’t have to be a slow, endless slog of Excel spreadsheets. A large reason for airlines pivoting from manual data reporting to SaaS tools like AMES for aircraft maintenance is that manual data entry is terribly inefficient.

In addition, reporting tools like Excel lack collaboration functionality (one user at a time) meaning airline fleet maintenance managers can spend endless hours in spreadsheets building reports, wasting valuable time and energy that would be better spent elsewhere. This also creates a key-man risk when the main fleet reporting manager is away from their desk or out sick.

Using OMEGA’s AMES software resolves these issues by allowing aircraft maintenance planners to work together (with multiple users) to easily store regular maintenance schedules. With AMES’ reporting tools, you can:

Improve the quality, accuracy, detail, and stability of information.
Reduce errors or reentry and communication problems with multiple sources.
Produce schedules that are more flexible to operations.
Provide complete visibility of plans for better process flows.
Deliver read-only versions to vendors and executives for discussion and decision making.
Share data with multiple departments through reports such as Plotter by Track.

To keep your airline’s quarterly reports accurate, optimize your aircraft maintenance allocations, and keep your fleet equipment safely in the air, try an AMES demo today.

Increased revenue/savings with reduced downtime

Boosting revenue sky high by decreasing aircraft ground time and improving aircraft availability is the ultimate goal of any successful airline and maintenance planning and scheduling team. And the crux of achieving it is minimizing delays and conflicts when it comes to enacting and maintaining the plan.

That’s where AMES shines when compared to alternative software solutions.

According to Bronya McAdams, Former Director of Strategic Planning (United Airlines), “AMES allows you to efficiently plan maintenance & reduce the number of aircraft required out of the schedule, especially during predefined peak schedules. By doing so, maintenance increases the number of aircraft available to the operation to schedule. Less aircraft in maintenance means more flying without purchasing & maintaining additional aircraft.”

Within 30 days of use, our subject matter experts can tailor our tools to your company’s needs to show immediate improvements in the following areas:

Simplify the aircraft maintenance and planning process.
Improve forecasting ability and integration of critical data with other departments.
Improve maintenance resource availability.
Reduce operating costs.
Minimize scheduling conflicts.
Minimize conflict marketing/production between teams.
Reduce maintenance response time.
Match fleet availability to market demand.
Reduce number of aircraft required out of the schedule.

Curious about how AMES can reproduce these results for your own airline? Contact Our team of subject matter experts about our 30-day Proof of Concept trial and schedule a quick demo for your organization here.

Safety - Regulation / Auditing tools

In the airline industry, staying in compliance with FAA regulations for your maintenance production plan regulations is a must when keeping your fleet in the air and fine-free. To keep passengers and maintenance teams safe and your fleet(s) in the air, aviation maintenance planning & scheduling tools need to meet regulatory and engineering mandates in order to be reliable.

That’s why many airlines rely heavily on AMES to import compliance data to improve their aircraft maintenance planning. Our software seamlessly integrates with leading compliant systems to create a Forecasted Future in compliance with business rules and constraints.

With Ames, you can:

Connect data from your compliance system.
Align Fleet Maintenance activities to the Operations & Flight Schedule parameters and constraints.
Automatically import/upload Aircraft times & requirement signoffs generated from compliance systems such as Trax, Camp, and Sceptre.

To learn more about using AMES to import compliance data to improve maintenance production plans, visit: https://omegaair.com/features/.

Be ready for anything

An airline can’t keep its fleet maintained if it’s not ready for anything. While last-minute scheduling changes used to be padded into maintenance plans, AMES creates plans that are proactive and go beyond simple forecasting and simulation.

Unlike traditional maintenance and planning tools, AMES takes advantage of all available critical information and data available to create a dynamic schedule for long and short-term maintenance, ensuring accurate maintenance scheduling for maximum efficiency.

With AMES, you can:

Produce schedules that are less likely to change.
Reduce cost associated with over and under availability of resources.
Mitigate the impact of last-minute changes.
Improve the responsiveness to operational needs.
Improve the quality, accuracy, detail, and stability of information.

At Omega, we’re dedicated to the smarter way of managing maintenance planning and scheduling while maintaining compliance. Our effective and efficient maintenance scheduling tool facilitates decision-making in aircraft maintenance planning for 15% of the world’s airlines, which comprise more than 20% of all aircraft in operation today.