Revamped SAS Sees Predictive Maintenance Gains

Behind the scenes of its recent restructuring, Scandinavian Airlines has been quietly building predictive maintenance capabilities to increase the reliability and efficiency of its fleet.

The airline has issued about 1,000 predictive maintenance work orders since going live with these capabilities at the beginning of 2023 on a sample fleet of 38 aircraft as part of efforts to build a business case for the technology. Today, Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) has nearly 100 aircraft covered by predictive maintenance, and operational reliability has increased for its connected fleet.

At the helm of SAS’ predictive efforts is Matias Bjerregaard, who took on the airline’s newly created role of predictive maintenance specialist in late 2022. He spoke with Inside MRO on the sidelines of Aviation Week’s MRO Middle East event about the process of building and refining SAS’ predictive maintenance operations.

The airline first began looking at predictive maintenance in 2018-19. It held discussions with several technology providers and eventually decided to test Airbus’ Sky­wise platform.

“From an Airbus perspective, I have a really good thing because I represent all the Airbus aircraft,” Bjerregaard said. SAS’ fleet includes Airbus A319s, A320ceos, A320neos, A330s and A350s. “I have a big enough fleet to make it scale, and I have a small enough fleet to test things out,” he added.

Additionally, he said the airline’s transformation from a large legacy carrier to a midsize one means many support functions, such as information technology and legal services, are performed in-house. “It’s easier to get things through” its operations without needing to rely on consultants, third parties or suppliers to do some of the work in implementing predictive maintenance, he said.

Although Bjerregaard has been given leeway to take the project and run with it, rolling out predictive maintenance on a broad scale has still been complicated. Things started ramping up in April 2022, when SAS became the Digital Alliance’s first customer for its Skywise Predictive Maintenance software. At the time, Bjerregaard was a maintenance supervisor at SAS and “doing a lot of Skywise programming and testing of what we could do.” The airline sent him to meet with the EasyJet team to learn how the low-cost carrier had implemented predictive maintenance.

Throughout the year, SAS worked to connect its aircraft to Skywise and gather data. Although SAS is reportedly considering the purchase of newer widebody airframes, it has been extending the life of its older fleet—the oldest model is about 24 years old. Some aircraft were too old for the carrier to rely on maintenance data from flight operations and maintenance exchangers (FOMAX) or aircraft condition monitoring system reports.

To bring these older aircraft up to speed, SAS recently completed retrofitting its fleet with Airbus’ retrofit maintenance exchanger (RMAX). The RMAX “can do one thing and one thing only—provide predictive maintenance data,” Bjerregaard said. With the RMAX installed, he said, older aircraft can report the same amount of data as new-­generation types.

After SAS launched predictive capabilities in January 2023, Bjerregaard spent the next six months creating a business case for management. “I was a liaison with our fleet manager, and he was very skeptical,” Bjerregaard said during a panel discussion at Aviation Week’s MRO Middle East in early February of this year. “It was really healthy for me because he put me through all the hoops. He got me to look at [predictive maintenance] in different ways and how to optimize it.”

Part of the process included identifying SAS’ stake­holders, “from the technician on the floor . . . all the way up to management,” Bjerregaard said, including the airline’s board and chief financial officer, who all had to sign off on the technology before it was approved. This also involved determining how much information each party needed to know and when.

Bjerregaard said stakeholders told him they did not want to get bogged down with details—they wanted clear, simple instructions. “We just issue a work order, and the work order will state what to do,” he said. “I’ll say, ‘This is due to predictive maintenance, and we are seeing a trend that does this and this, and I want you to replace the valve. I want you to do the [troubleshooting manual]. I want you to measure some wires,’ because otherwise it just ends up confusing.”

Bjerregaard also relied heavily on support from Digital Alliance partners, such as Airbus and Delta Air Lines. “I’m really lucky to be in a position where I can [lean] on the shoulders of these giants,” he said. “They have been so open and frank. They have been telling me what they’ve done wrong and what they’ve done right, so I didn’t need to make the same mistakes that they did, and I can just build on them.”

The predictive maintenance project received the necessary approvals in December 2023, thanks in part to data showing that the technology accurately predicts maintenance issues. “What was cool is that I can go back historically to match an event with predictive solutions,” Bjerregaard said. “We had an 83% match of maintenance events and alerts—so 83% of the time, a maintenance event happened [when it was predicted to happen].”

Prior to connecting the rest of the SAS fleet via RMAX retrofits, Bjerregaard conducted an investigation that showed the airline’s A320neos fitted with FOMAX and providing predictive maintenance data were 0.26% more operationally reliable than its fleet of unconnected A320neos.

Bjerregaard’s team is now monitoring two key performance indicators: success rate and accuracy. He said the success rate is typically 83-86%, with 93-96% accuracy in positive findings when a work order is issued due to predictive maintenance alerts. SAS has generated about 3,500 such alerts, helping it to identify root causes of recurring issues such as hydraulic or oxygen leaks.

In addition to Skywise, SAS has been using predictive maintenance tools created by Digital Alliance members GE Aerospace, Liebherr-Aerospace and Safran. For example, in February 2025, SAS completed a predictive maintenance project with GE to address common challenges in bleed systems and flight controls for Embraer 190s. The airline is also working with Safran on predictive maintenance efforts targeting nacelle anti-ice and A320 bleed systems.

Beyond predictive maintenance, Bjerregaard’s team also runs repetitive and preventive maintenance operations. “When you have these things under control—reliability, repetitive and preventive [maintenance]—then you can add the predictive,” he said. “Predictive is the cherry on top—it’s taking the last bit of information you get from the aircraft and using it in another way. It’s not a stand-alone thing. Predictive is at the top, and it gives us the edge when we’re talking about technical delays. This is the next step to utilize all the data coming down from the aircraft in a clever way where we can at least have a chance to protect some flights from cancellation.”

This year, Bjerregaard is moving SAS’ predictive maintenance operations from under the engineering department into its maintenance control center “to get situational awareness cemented into maintenance control,” he said. The idea is to instill a mindset focused on long-term solutions rather than immediate fixes. “What we have seen a lot of the time is that it’s been a lot of isolated events, but . . . a lot of them are connected to faults,” he said. “We need to understand why this is happening.”

Bjerregaard also stresses the importance of continued collaboration with industry partners. “I think when we look at predictive maintenance as a whole, we can’t silo it in one airline,” he said. “It’s not protective [of data], because we all benefit from having a more resilient fleet, so we get better spare parts, we get better engineering, and we get better solutions from OEMs. This is benefiting us all.”