Two years building ELA: an AI system for aviation maintenance documentation designed from the start for certification, not just conversation.
In this article we lay out why generic chatbots fall short in aviation contexts (unpredictable outputs, no source traceability, no audit trail), then walk through the five pillars we built into ELA:
- Source-grounded responses with direct citations
- Operator control over currency, confidence and filtering
- Continuous evaluation across retrieval, faithfulness, relevance and completeness
- Safety-first workflows for critical queries
- A full, exportable audit trail
We also map ELA’s architecture to EU Regulation 1321/2014 (M.A.401, M.A.305, M.A.402, CAMO.A.220) and publish our current performance metrics for part-lookup, troubleshooting, procedural and informational queries.