The message was clear from the last satisfaction survey of Eurocopter’s customers and operators: 85% of those surveyed want technical documentation to be available on the Internet. “That’s an overwhelming majority,” noted François Schonek, Eurocopter documentation manager for commercial helicopters. “And we’ve already launched a project that will satisfy our customers over time.” There are currently three generations of technical documentation for the Eurocopter range: Paper documentation from the former range, the “Open” electronic media introduced in 1992 for second-generation helicopters (the Ecureuil/Astar, Dauphin and Super Puma) and “Indoc” and “X Indoc” on CD-ROM for Eurocopter’s current range of commercial and governmental helicopters. “We’ve established two objectives in order to handle all the different documentation,” explained Mr. Schonek. “First up, all documentation for future helicopters will be adapted for publication on Internet, via Keycopter, the Eurocopter customer portal, as soon as it is drawn up. Next, we will be converting the ‘Open’ and ‘Indoc’ documentation to a format adapted to Internet. In both cases, we will need to develop an interface so that customers can access their documentation and benefit from new user functions, such as a filter so that they can find exactly the right information for their helicopter configuration.”
The EC175 is set to be the first helicopter to take full advantage of this new tool. Beginning in 2010, Keycopter will offer the most basic online document applications–the more complex documents will be available the following year.