United Airlines has partnered with Airbus to connect to the latter’s open-data platform Skywise to improve the airline’s maintenance and engineering operations on its Airbus fleet.

The airline and Airbus had signed an agreement to this effect recently.

Skywise features flexible and visual tools, which allow airlines to store, access, manage and analyse data with greater efficiency while benchmarking against other airline users’ trends.

By providing all technology elements, including data warehousing, visualisation, alerting and machine learning packages, in one place, the open-data platform allows United Airlines and other carriers to develop and deploy their own analytical products.

Skywise also seamlessly connects with the Palantir Foundry data integration platform, which United Airlines began using last year.

United Airlines expects the combination of Palantir Foundry and Airbus’ Skywise to provide the data and tools to improve its operational reliability.

United Airlines digital products and analytics vice-president Praveen Sharma said: “We are proud to partner with Airbus and Palantir on this new data platform, which will allow us to maximise the performance of our Airbus fleet by analysing the best data we have available and using those insights to continuously improve our operation.”

Launched in 2017, Skywise is being used as the platform of reference by major aviation players to improve operational performance, ensuring data continuity. More than 70 airlines globally are currently connected to Skywise.

Airbus digital transformation officer Marc Fontaine said: “Skywise will bring significant value by unlocking data, which will power operational efficiency in aircraft maintenance and flight operations for United Airlines’ fleet.

“Skywise will bring significant value by unlocking data.”

“By extending Skywise to other company business functions, with Palantir, the potential for United will be even bigger.”

Skywise provides a single-access point to users for their aggregated and anonymised aviation data, obtained from multiple sources across the industry, into a single Cloud-based platform.

According to Airbus, customers connected to the platform will be able to get more accurate predictions and models when airlines or OEMs share more data into the Skywise Core platform.