Bluetail, an AI-powered aircraft document management platform, is making its Auto Research technology available for Bluetail Fleet customers.

Auto Research is a new capability in Bluetail Fleet Compliance that automates the research for projects such as conformity inspections, compliance audits and pre-purchase inspections. Work that has typically taken maintenance teams weeks can now be completed in days.

For Part 135 operators, directors of maintenance and MRO teams, compliance research is one of the most time-consuming jobs in the hangar. Before a report goes to the FAA's Flight Standards District Office (FSDO), someone has to go through binders and PDFs, track down every applicable airworthiness directive (AD) and service bulletin (SB), and find the specific logbook entry or work order showing the work was done. That job usually lands on experienced technicians who would otherwise be working on aircraft. The regulatory pressure Auto Research targets is real and recurring: the FAA requires every aircraft added to a Part 135 certificate to undergo a conformity inspection, and the agency's own guidance notes that maintenance records must be complete with no gaps in documentation.

Auto Research carries out that search automatically. Maintenance teams upload the records they already have, and Auto Research scans the full record set to identify every AD, SB, inspection and component that requires proof of compliance. Each item links to the exact document that proves it. The result is an organised, citation-backed report that a team can review and hand to its FSDO.

“Compliance projects can tie up a team for weeks, mostly spent hunting through records rather than evaluating them. Auto Research finds the documents that prove compliance and extracts their data into structured fields, turning weeks of research into days, so aircraft experts can focus on safety and quality instead of digging through thousands of inconsistently formatted pages,” confirms Kent Pickard, chief technology officer of Bluetail.

Auto Research needs no new workflow or manual data entry to get started. It works from the maintenance records customers already upload to Bluetail, and it runs inside Bluetail Fleet's Compliance suite with the platform's other records tools.

“Once an aircraft's paper records are digitised, Bluetail's Auto Research turns compliance verification across multiple records into a simple process that takes hours instead of weeks,” explains Daniel Hopkins, director of Hopkins Aviation Services, a Bluetail partner. “Getting it right is critical, not just for verifying airworthiness documentation but for actual airworthiness compliance of critical components and inspection processes tied to OEM and regulatory requirements.”

Bluetail Fleet, the product tier inside which Auto Research sits, launched in April 2025 and was built specifically for Part 135 and Part 91 operators managing multiple aircraft.