AirChain - Towards Blockchain-based Aircraft
Maintenance Record System
Wictor Lang Jensen, Sille Jessing, Wei-Yang Chiu, and Weizhi Meng
SPTAGE Lab, Department of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science,
Technical University of Denmark, Denmark
Email: {weich,weme}@dtu.dk
Abstract—Civil aviation (aircraft) is one of the public trans-
portation industries that requires the highest safety standards.
However, several accidents on aircraft maintenance system had
revealed that there is a need to secure the record integrity and
traceability. Motivated by this issue and supported by an airline,
in this work, we design and implement AirChain, a blockchain-
based aircraft maintenance record system, in which the data
can be stored in a way that is both resistant to tampering and
easy to access. The experimental results indicate the viability and
practicability of our system.
Index Terms—Blockchain, Decentralized application, Aircraft
maintenance, Smart contract, Record and data integrity
I. I NTRODUCTION
Unclear or falsified records can cause misinterpretation and
miscommunication within repair crews, resulting in incorrect
repair work, or unsatisfactory overhaul. Civil aviation is one
of the public transportation industries that requires the highest
safety standards [9], [19]. It is of great importance for a system
that can keep track of records without compromising integrity
and can be audited by all participating parties [22]. However,
such requirement of record keeping is expected in all civil
airliners, the human errors and cultural environment will still
affect the outcome result of the practice. Kind of unauthorized
and intentional alteration of existing maintainace records may
directly or indirectly causes serious incidents [5].
For example, U.S. News agency reported a small incident
that a man hacked into the aircraft maintenance system and
altered several existed records [10]. Also, China Airline report-
ed that several workers disregarded the standard procedure and
failed to keep the maintenance records’ integrity, which caused
an accident that perished hundreds [3]. Recently, Ethiopean
Airline, with an accident that perished hundreds, was busted
by an insider, who stated that: “A history at the company of
falsifying records and signing off on dodgy maintenance and
repair jobs” [4]. Thus, providing a record system with integrity
insurance is urgently needed.
a) Related work: Blockchain technology is a promising
solution that can provide a unified, auditable, and immutable
data storage in a decentralized network [1], [2]. It has been
applied into many different domains including intrusion detec-
tion [11], [17], trust management [14], [15], software defined
networking [12], public transportation [7], [8], traffic filtra-
tion [13], [16], Public Key Infrastructure [6], and more. For
978-1-6654-9538-7/22/$31.00 ©2022 IEEE
civil aviation, Rajkov [20] firstly presented a survey regarding
evaluating the effect of integrating blockchain into aircrafts’
spare part management. Madhwal and Panfilov [19] combined
the aircrafts’ supply-chain management with blockchain tech-
nology, and discussed the difficulties in smart supply-chain
management in aviation industry.
Then Schyga et al. [21] showed a prototype system based
on Hyperledger, which could create a Permission Blockchain
System (PBS) for aircraft maintenance, repair and overhaul.
Ho et al. [22] proposed a similar blockchain-based system for
aircraft maintenance, similar to [21]. Their system focused on
parts’ traceability and trackability for the inventory manage-
ment. Aleshi et al. [18] focused on the aircraft maintenance
records and explored the feasibility of applying a blockchain.
This is the most relevant work to ours, but their system was
mainly relied on the information from a private plane, and
they did not show any performance result.
b) Contributions: Motivated by the above work, we ad-
vocate that using blockchain as the underlying datastore is one
promising solution to secure the aircraft’s maintenance record
system. It uses the power of masses to perform collective-
booking and consensus-reaching, in which such kind of data-
store is still able to remain its integrity in a decentralized
zero-trust network. To summarize, our main contributions are:
(i) We develop and implement AirChain, a blockchain-based
aircraft maintenance record system, which is supported from
China Airline, e.g., the format of CLB, TLB and their partial
procedure. (ii) In the evaluation, with the help from airline’s
technical personnel, we simulate an experimental setup and
explore the initial performance of our system.
II. O UR P ROPOSED S YSTEM – A IR C HAIN
Our proposed AirChain can involve one or multiple servers
located across different sites, hence multiple access clients can
connect to their local server. These local servers can maintain
the blockchain locally and operate in a collaborative mode, as
shown in Fig. 1.
In this work, we choose Hyperledger Besu [25] as our de-
velopment platform, which supports both EVM and the official
Web3 interface. There are several major smart contracts in our
system described as follows:
• The Log of CLB and TLB: CLB and TLB are short
for Cabin Log Book and Technical Log Book. These are
the two main documents for recording aircraft faults. In

Fig. 1. The system overview of AirChain
particular, they can be roughly divided into two sections:
one section is used when an error is firstly recorded, and
the other is used when some actions have been taken to fix
the error, which in turn should be recorded. Generally, it
has a structure that can be divided between a newly added
error and what has been fixed. Each new case with an
error instance should be assigned an ID, which is used to
update that specific document with the fix specifications.
Finally, the document needs to be approved by certified
professional or manager before it can be eventually pub-
lished as official. Our system designs the structure of CLB
and TLB with the embedment of Permission Manager, a
smart contract that manages roles and permissions. Our
design can control each user’s access to each function
provided by the smart contract.
• Permission Manager: This smart contract records
what can be accessed by each user. When a function in
the CLB and TLB is triggered, such function will consult
Permission Manager to obtain the access right of relevant
users. Then, it utilizes the provided information to accept
or reject a user’s request.
• Main Contract: Though naming a “main” contract
here may look confusing, such contract is the most impor-
tant smart contract that ensures the system security. When
a smart contract is deployed, it should be immutable.
Although the contract’s state can be changed, the code
cannot, even if the possibility of invalidating the contract
is decided by a programmer. If no destructor has been
described, such smart contract will continue running. This
means that when a logic error or a flaw is discovered in
the smart contract, we have to invalidate the contract, or
forcefully update the front-end program to direct itself to
the newly updated smart contract.
III. E VALUATION
We collected data by working with China Airlines (Taiwan)
such as CLB and TLB format, and constructed a simulated
environment with some virtual machines as both clients and
servers. To make the system as applicable to an actual airport
as possible, authentic data was received from China Airlines.
From the airline data specifications about under what circum-
TABLE I
T IME COMPLETION TABLE
nCLB/Time Adding Getting Updating Getting Updated
0 N/A 0.78 s N/A N/A
1 0.85s 0.80s 0.76s 0.80s
100 7.32s 1.53s 0.77s 2.05s
1,000 50.29s 20.03s 0.81s 2.25s
stances it is acceptable to change the maintenance record as
well as other information was given.
Here our initial test aims to examine whether our system
works properly in an expected network structure, and see how
fast a miner node is able to process the requests. As there was
no way for computers to communicate with outside client, it
is impossible to ensure when all data was received on the end
server. This also largely depended on connection speed, and
thus the main goal of our test is to give an estimate and check
whether the system is viable. This test was performed by the
following operations:
• Generating 100, 1000 and 10,000 CLBs:
• Manually submitting a CLB
• Requesting a list of CLB
After each increment, CLBs would then be signed and
finished, based on the request. Table I presents the completion
time for processing the requests. We observe that there appears
to be a large discrepancy between the time it required to
receive the updated documents alone versus all documents
submitted. This is most likely caused by the server compiling
every CLB into an HTML document before sending the result
to the client. This compilation time along with the transferred
massive text is likely the main reason of the delay.
The results indicate that our proposed AirChain could work
well as intended. A user can log in and, depending on their
clearance and permissions, they can both add logs as well
as sign them. The system is built upon a private blockchain,
which can create a unique possibility to have access to all
previous data as well as ensuring a level of security to the
data integrity on the chain itself. The system was developed by
involving everything from the deployment of a smart contract
to the usage of user’s addresses as a focal point for managing
the user-specific data.
IV. C ONCLUSION
Due to the importance of aircraft maintenance, in this work,
we developed and implemented AirChain, a blockchain-based
aircraft maintenance record system, which aims to ensure the
record integrity and traceability. We selected Hyperledger Besu
as our development platform, showcased the system design
and evaluated the system’s processing time by working with
an airline organization. The results demonstrate its viability
and practicability. Our future work will focus on scalability
evaluation, how to make the system more versatile and how
to protect data privacy.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This project is partially supported by H2020 DataVaults.
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