OCR in Document Management for Aviation Companies

Storage: the use of optical character recognition scanners to digitize paper documents is nothing new. An airline company needs tons of data to be stored. The use of OCR for document management simplifies storing and managing huge amounts of essential technical data.
Standardization: There is no single standard for aircraft paperwork, which causes a lot of inconveniences, especially if an airline operates planes from different lessors and receives logs and technical documentation in different formats. OCR for documents, especially powered with AI, allows data to be automatically brought under different standards. It is possible to quickly reformat reports created in the fashion of a lesser company to your needs and vice versa.
Search: OCR technology enables Google-like search among digitized documents. You can quickly find the necessary flight information, like airworthiness if your data is scanned and stored properly.
Savings: cost savings are one of the most important benefits of using OCR for airlines. Usually, the check-up and digitalization of flight papers are performed by flight engineers, although that’s not their direct responsibility. Many companies hire third-party vendors to create digital copies of their documentation. Both ways are cost-hungry. At the same time, the implementation of OCR can cut unnecessary spending. It also cuts the cost of saving paper copies. According to the EASA report, storing a physical document for an aviation company costs 19EUR. Yet, storing a digitized one costs 3 EUR.
Sharing: an AI-powered OCR tool can quickly transform data with a pilot’s notes into the right format to share them in real time.
Safety: the high-quality digitalization of paper documents creates a backup to guarantee the air company’s liability. For example, if a company goes broke, it can be sold and brought back to market faster if all the documents are present. Moreover, the combination of OCR and AI creates conditions for safer document storage.
Scalability: for an air company to scale, an ability to quickly manage, send, and check documentation is important. Using OCR for aircraft paperwork makes vertical and horizontal scaling easier, which is especially important in recent years, as many companies had to scale down during COVID lockdowns and scale up when countries reopened their borders.