What is Box Diving?

From my personal experience, I’m confident in saying that aircraft maintainers are, on the whole, a pretty darn positive group. And why shouldn’t they be? They spend their days working with like-minded professionals on and around some amazing airplanes.

But, to a person, if you want to put a damper on any A&P’s day, just ask them to do some “box diving.” That will surely turn their smile upside down. What is box diving, you ask?

Well, it’s the unenviable task of gathering up the information that is usually stored in multiple banker’s boxes, filing cabinets, or even laundry baskets – yes, I’ve seen them used.

Box diving is such a common practice amongst business and private aircraft maintainers that I’m a bit surprised that leading A&P schools haven’t added this sort of PhysEd to their curriculums. Lifting those heavy boxes and spending hours hunched over a desk, flipping through countless log pages requires strength and stamina.

Of course, box diving is just the preliminary activity to round out the volumes upon volumes of an aircraft’s paper operational and maintenance logbooks. Once it’s all in one place, the unlucky technician can spend (waste) hours, if not days, searching through page-after-page searching for part numbers, paint codes, 8130 forms, work orders, and/or serial numbers. The technician needs to verify exactly what has been done to a particular aircraft in the past, to properly prepare to meet the requirements of its pending maintenance task card.

And no matter how many boxes you dive through, there’s no gold medal waiting at the end of it all. Once you find the information in the bottom of a box, only then does the actual work begin. And only to start over again when the next project comes in.

Not all digital files are created equal.

Maybe you’re thinking, you’re not a box diver since you’ve put all of our aircraft’s logs into Excel files. Well, not to rain on your parade, but all you’ve really done is trade manually flipping through thousands of pages – and the inevitable paper cuts that go along with it – to having to spend valuable time scrolling through mind-numbingly long line lists on a screen that’s probably too small for the task.

No doubt the truly Excel-savvy amongst you are saying, “But, I can add tags and keywords to the files to make searching easier.” Yes, you can do that. But it’s not easy or scalable. Now you have the added workload of finding and manually adding said tags and/or keywords to every line on every page. It’s this kind of busy work that has qualified A&Ps considering a career change.

There has to be a better way.

And there is. Once all of your aircraft’s information is scanned and stored by Bluetail, its exclusive MACH Search capability can do all of the digital heavy lifting and box diving for you. Based on the most advanced optical character recognition (OCR) machine-learning capabilities, Bluetail’s enterprise-level MACH Search has turned aviation record-keeping and records searching into something that can be completed in mere seconds, without breaking a sweat.

It searches through reams of digitized aircraft logs and records – literally, tens-of-thousands of individual entries – in less time than it took you to read this sentence

Bluetail’s MACH Search isn’t just fast; it does things that other systems just can’t do. For example, it can read a mechanic’s handwriting – yes, even yours. And, it takes that to another level by searching and identifying a logbook entry by the technician’s signature.

Bluetail’s MACH Search capability is just one of our “gold medal” worthy array of aircraft operations and maintenance logbook digitization services.

To learn more about Bluetail, check out our short video or get in touch with us today!