By Jean S. Bozman
Long Beach, Calif.

A new Internet service, now in its shakedown phase, holds the promise of delivering large segments of 40,000-page maintenance manuals for the MD-11 jet to dozens of airlines worldwide by 1998. On-line documents and manuals for other jets will follow.

By September, airline maintenance crews will get their first look at repair bulletins provided by the Internet server, a Hewlett-Packard Co. HP 9000 Model 800 E UNIX server and an Oracle 7.1 database. Douglas information systems managers are starting to ship passwords to top airline customers.

Dramatic business payoffs are expected in dollar savings and timely delivery of aircraft repair data, said Brad Foreman, Douglas' general manager of maintenance and modifications engineering. Producing documents in digital form over the Internet, on CD-ROM and on floppy disks will cost less than half what current paper-based documents cost, Foreman said.

SECURITY A PRIORITY
All visitors to Douglas' home page will get basic company information, but those with passwords will be allowed to dive into a deeper level of secure data.

"We do have a lot of concerns about security," said Pauline Nornholm, Douglas' general manager of IS. "We have a whole team from my group and in corporate looking into the implications of going on the Internet."

The Internet server includes several layers of security, including encryption from Netscape Communications Corp.'s Commerce Server, passwords and an Internet firewall.

"You want to confirm who you're talking to and encrypt whatever sensitive data you're sending between two points," said IS project manager Douglas E. Alberg, who led the Internet project.

Large companies are edging closer to one another on the Internet while worrying about which data to share with their best customers.

Douglas is "early in doing this," said Bob Weber, a principal at Northeast Consulting Resources, Inc. in Boston. "Within the next year to 18 months, you're going to see a lot of the early adopter companies trying this with their most trusted partners."

In the process, he said, large firms will save the cost of dedicated T1 leased lines and shipment of paper documents to top customers.

SNEAK PREVIEW
Since June, an early-view program allowed a few airlines to provide feedback on Douglas' Internet site. One of these, Delta Air Lines in Atlanta, is readying a system to download data from the Internet server for use on its own maintenance computers.

Because the data is delivered in Internet-compatible standard formats, it can be reused by airlines. That, in turn, will reduce programming time at Douglas.

"I told my [IS] people we're here to deliver information on [the basis of] a business need, not to develop code," Nornholm said. A three-person team is converting documents to Standard Generalized Markup Language format with the Internet's Hypertext Markup Language extensions.

There is already some experimentation in using Pentium-based computers on jets for Internet access by pilots and maintenance crews.

"If the aircraft is on the ground in Tokyo, you could take the system on the airplane, plug a cellular phone into it and access the Internet," Foreman said. "You could pass the data [in] real time from Long Beach to your computer right there on the airplane."

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