When aircraft engines arrive at Vector Aerospace Engine Services-Atlantic (VAESA) for repairs or maintenance, each component could undergo a complex route that includes cleaning, inspection and repair, with the work taking place on as many as a dozen different machines and stations. Tracking every component is absolutely critical; if any one of them is missing, delays can result, caused by manual searches for that item and its order paperwork.

VAESA had been seeking an RFID-based solution for more than a year, and is now in the completion stages of a six-month pilot of a passive ultrahigh-frequency (UHF) solution. Having proven to itself that the solution works, and that it yields 100 percent tag read rates, the company is now planning the installation of a permanent system, in order to track engine components by means of fixed reader portals, desktop interrogators at workstations, and EPC Gen 2 passive RFID tags affixed to equipment paperwork.

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