In 2022, as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine stalled in the mud north of Kyiv, the world witnessed the unglamorous importance of equipment maintenance: The military column couldn’t proceed because of faulty parts in the tanks and trucks.
The U.S. military has persistent maintenance headaches, too: A 2022 GAO study found that over the last decade, 26 types of aircraft (among them the Air Force’s F-22 fighter jets and all of the Navy’s C-130s transport planes) fell short of their mission-capable goals every single year.
Responding to the U.S. Department of Defense’s need for better maintenance tracking, Shift5, established in 2019 in Arlington, Virginia, gathers onboard data from planes and trains as well as military data, monitoring wear and tear. It has also begun adding private airlines as clients, holding the promise of dramatically reducing airport delays.
In 2023, it launched its Predictive Maintenance Module, which collects data from vehicles’ serial bus—the key communication channel within modern vehicles’ electronics systems—analyzing a total of 37 billion signals relayed in real time from individual parts in vehicle fleets for defense and private airlines. The system flagged 1.8 million deviations for review by technicians last year alone.
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