BOEING has selected Air France and American Airlines to participate in the development of an aircraft monitoring system designed to reduce flight delays, cancellations, air turn-backs and diversions. The carriers will test the new service, called Airplane Health Management (AHM), during the next year to ensure its availability to airlines in first-quarter 2004. A third carrier will be added from the Asia-Pacific region shortly. AHM monitors the health of an aircraft during flight and relays that information in real time from the air to the ground enabling an airlines engineering and operations departments to be ready to deal with problems as it arrives at the gate. AHM is designed to help operators reduce the number and length of despatch delays and convert certain tasks from non-routine to scheduled maintenance. In addition, AHM will support long-term fleet reliability programmes by helping airlines identify recurring faults and trends. http://www.boeing.com