Gatelink High Speed Communications with Parked Aircraft 932610

As aircraft and aircraft systems increase in capability and complexity, the information necessary to monitor, maintain and trouble-shoot these systems also increases. This maintenance data, provided by aircraft condition monitoring systems (ACMS), on-board maintenance systems (OMS), and BITE data from individual Line Replaceable Units (LRUs), is growing at a rate never before encountered. Traditional methods of handling this plethora of data, such as quick access recorders (QARs) with removable media, are rapidly becoming too cumbersome to meet the efficiencies required in today's aviation business climate. Gatelink is a solution to this growing data management problem. It is the key element to the implementation of systems that provide automatic retrieval of data from an aircraft, expeditious dissemination of the data to the organizations that need it, and the subsequent analysis and processing of the data. This paper describes the Gatelink architecture, some of the potential applications for Gatelink, and its current development status.