Lufthansa Flight Training and Novell Partner to Ground Excess Flight Operating Costs

As a company that many of the world's leading airlines rely on for training services in an industry that is looking to cut costs, Lufthansa Flight Training (LFT) needed to find a way to increase cockpit efficiency while saving money. With Novell® technology and a strong partner relationship, LFT created a mobile training and flight information solution that will help a German airline save an estimated $1 million or more per year.

LFT, a wholly owned subsidiary of Deutsche Lufthansa AG, has decades of experience in training cockpit and cabin crews for many large airlines. Together with German airline LTU International Airways and T&A Systeme GmbH, a leading Novell systems integration partner in Germany, LFT created the SkyBook solution, a dynamic repository of digital flight-related manuals and online training that reduced piles of cockpit paperwork to a single laptop for each crew member.

"We started with a brief sketch of an idea and were amazed at what we could create with Novell technology," said Arno Therburg, business unit manager at T&A Systeme. "NetWare® gives us a stable and reliable platform, ZENworks® offers everything we need to distribute and manage content, and eDirectory™ provides the security and scalability for the future so we can accommodate multiple airlines."

The first step was to reduce the paper clutter and increase efficiency in airplane cockpits. By putting millions of pages of manuals online, pilots have up-to-the-minute information to reduce flight preparation time, calculate optimal speeds and get maximum performance from each aircraft based on factors such as current conditions, flight occupancy and airport. Pilots are able to update their SkyBook laptops from any supported airport terminal, as well as via the Internet, to keep up with the latest flight-related data.

"Pilots now have all the information at their fingertips to precisely calculate flight weights and speeds to get the maximum performance out of every flight," said Olaf Windhäuser, head of IT Infrastructure at Lufthansa Flight Training. "Efficiently managing payload can help airlines save tons of fuel per year, which adds up to a huge cost savings."

Airlines are also always looking at ways to make training more efficient and to reduce the costs of flying pilots to a central location for classroom training. With SkyBook, crews spend fewer days in classrooms because they can access training courses anywhere and anytime, allowing them to make good use of layovers and downtime. Pilots also stay current on the latest information, rather than waiting for the next training class or manual revision.

LFT and T&A Systeme built the new SkyBook infrastructure in less than three months, deploying it to seven airports in Germany. Flight data, manuals and computer-based training are administered on a central server and distributed to airport terminals.

Novell NetWare 6 and Novell Cluster Services are at the heart of the SkyBook system, providing stable performance, reliable backup and zero downtime. Novell Resource Management capabilities utilize Novell ZENworks to efficiently manage the distribution of content, applications and updates to airport servers and then to each individual laptop for true managed mobility. ZENworks integrates with user information stored in Novell eDirectory so LFT can manage laptops more efficiently according to user identity. With policy management capabilities, LFT can quickly customize applications and information for an individual pilot or a particular group.

"Novell ZENworks is the key to the SkyBook solution," Windhäuser said. "We simply could not get the same results with any other software."

LTU International Airways is the first beneficiary of the SkyBook solution. The airline is able to deliver revisions to their manuals in minutes rather than the two weeks required for paper distribution. This has also reduced paperwork by 90 percent or more than 3 million sheets of paper per year. Online manuals and training help pilots make good use of layover time, while significantly reducing travel and training costs.

"The SkyBook solution has made a paperless cockpit a reality for us," said Captain Christoph Schippel, project manager flight operations at LTU International Airways. "Before SkyBook, our pilots were required to take stacks of manuals onto the aircraft. Now all they need is their laptop, passport and sunglasses. We see it as our main competitive advantage and estimate an annual return on investment of at least $1 million."