Spar Aerospace is a leading aviation services company specializing in the maintenance, repair and overhaul, and upgrade of military and civilian aircraft. A subsidiary of L-3 Communications, Spar is a global company, servicing customers in North America, Europe, South America, Asia, Africa, Australia and the Middle East.

Spar has a contract to update the maintenance publications for a fleet of aircraft. Under that contract, Spar maintains approximately 40 manuals that cover aircraft structure, mechanical systems (fuel hydraulics pneumatics etc.) and avionics systems.

"The HTML / XML output, dubbed an ‘Interactive Electronic Technical Manual’ or ‘IETM,’ is designed to be delivered over a wide area network," explained Dave Burkhart of Spar Aerospace. "Because the data is critical to keeping the aircraft flying, end users in certain locations must have access to the information regardless of the status of the network. For those locations it is necessary to download the entire content to hard drives. Content synchronization software is used to ensure the content is identical between the hard drives and the server."

For searching of the manual contents, both on the Web and on laptops replications in the field, Spar chose dtSearch. "Search requirements for this project were extensive and stringent. We investigated most of the ‘high end’ search engines out there," said Mr. Burkhart, Information Delivery Systems Developer at Spar. "We decided to use dtSearch because of its versatility, cost-effectiveness and ability to be quickly implemented with no outside consulting and little in-house effort. Both dtSearch Web and dtSearch Publish have proven to be excellent value."

Mr. Burkhart added with regard to dtSearch support: "I have been very impressed by the dtSearch support organization. Questions emailed to dtSearch support are invariably answered within a matter of a few hours. Answers are always appropriate, straight forward, clear and unambiguous."

From Computerworld Canada:  "Aviation firm earns wings with new text search ... Spar chose dtSearch Corp.’s text-search product, dtSearch Web, to serve the information up in an easily indexed manner online."  For "'a requirement that we have to run this thing on stand-alone PCs,' ... Spar signed on for dtSearch Publish."  More

For more information on Spar, please call (613) 569-7335 or email GovBusiness.Spar@L-3com.com. You can also visit Spar online at www.spar.ca.

To reach dtSearch’s Corp.’s Canadian distributor RCC Consulting, please call 1-800-864-0227, email ron@rcc-cga.com, or visit RCC Consulting online at www.rcc-cga.com.