Decades of fragmented tooling, 2M sq. ft. of hangar floor.
AAR's MRO business runs across over 2 million square feet of aircraft hangar space. Mechanics, supervisors, and operations leadership were tracking work across spreadsheets, paper, and dozens of legacy tools — context that lived in heads, not systems.
The work: replace decades of fragmented tooling with a unified digital platform that mechanics on the floor and executives in the boardroom could both rely on — without disrupting active maintenance work or grounding aircraft.
A typical AAR maintenance bay — seven concurrent aircraft, three shifts, dozens of disconnected tools.
Observation-driven discovery across the full MRO loop.
We led a 10-person UX team in workflow analysis, prototyping, and validation across the full MRO process — from inbound aircraft inspection through release-to-service.
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Discovery
100+ stakeholder interviews and workflow shadowing across four hangars over twelve weeks.
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Design sprints
Three iteration cycles, each ending in user validation with mechanics, supervisors, and ops leadership.
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Build & ship
November 2023 launch with phased rollout to operations teams across the AAR network.
To keep design grounded in the actual work, we established an Observations and Insights database in Airtable: a continuously updated source where 5–20 contributors collected 100+ observations weekly, feeding both design and roadmap decisions in real time.
Initiated SUSS/UX-Lite surveys with the operating team, building feedback loops that compressed validation cycles from quarters to weeks. We worked directly with AAR's leadership — VPs of Engineering, Product, and Business — to align discovery with business priorities and keep the digital roadmap honest.
Mobile app for in-hangar maintenance teams
Operations dashboard for supervisors and leadership
Concourse launched, then won Aviation Weekly's Laureate Award.
Concourse launched in November 2023 and went on to win Aviation Weekly's Laureate Award in 2024 — recognition for innovation in aviation. The platform now drives day-to-day work for mechanics across AAR's network, and the discovery infrastructure we set up continues to inform product decisions weekly.
SNACKS didn't just rebuild our tooling — they rebuilt how we think about the work itself.VP of Engineering, AAR