When you’re trying to repair a plane and get it back into action, the last thing you want to do is thumb through a 500-page manual looking for just the right procedure. The U.S. Air Force knows that its success depends on keeping its planes in the sky and functioning – and returning them to duty as quickly as possible.

Thus, it was looking for a way to ease access to the technical manuals associated with its AWACS airplane. The manuals were written in SGML, but the Air Force wanted to transition them to XML in an effort to make them more easily searched as well as viewed from a browser, specifically IE 5.0 and above.

The Air Force soon found that the transition wasn’t going to be easy. The search feature was particularly troublesome, since it wanted technicians to be able to search through the structured data without having to resort to a formal database. A key criteria was that AWACS technical documentation be accessible -- and searchable -- via the Web from anywhere in the world.

The Air Force hired General Dynamics (formerly Veridian Systems) to build a Transition Process Manager (TPM) to transform the SGML into XML. General Dynamics then decided to integrate IXIASOFT’s TEXTML Server into the TPM to support the search function.

The result? A fully XML-based, searchable version of all 150,000 AWACS technical documents, available online via a Web browser from anywhere in the world. And not only are manuals readily accessible and easy to search, they are now far easier to update, with many revisions happening in real-time, the Air Force said.

As a result, the new system is estimated to be saving the Air Force $500,000 per year – not to mention the time saved getting repairs finished and planes back in the air.