The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is the primary agency responsibility for the safety of civil aviation. In regulating the safety of air travel, the FAA issues and enforces regulations and minimum standards relating to the manufacture, operation, and maintenance of aircraft. In addition to safety, the FAA also protects the security of civil aviation, and enforces regulations under the Hazardous Materials Transportation Act applicable to shipments by air.

For convenient one-stop reference, Tdata's IApproach brings together all FAA airworthiness materials. The collection incudes FAA Directives, Service Bulletins, Handbooks, equipment lists, advanced record keeping, and much more. Users can fill out Electronic FAA Forms on-screen and save them for future recall. Best of all, Tdata compresses all of the data to fit on a single CD.

Tdata operates by obtaining the latest information from aircraft manufacturers and government sources. Tdata then catalogs the information into its internal document management system, verifying all revision levels and pages. While enhancing relevant graphics, Tdata then converts the text portion of print documents to computer-readable text through OCR. Finally, the company double-checks the accuracy of all documents.

For full-text searching of IApproach, Tdata chose the dtSearch Text Retrieval Engine. “We chose dtSearch because it was the most powerful choice both for the end users and for the speed of the indexing,” said Jim Thomas, President of Tdata. With regard to indexing, Mr. Thomas explained: “Our previous indexing system took 12 hours to process versus 20 minutes with dtSearch. This makes a difference of one full day in delivery to our customers.”

Tdata has over a decade of experience in aircraft information, and has been FAA accepted for over 10 years. For more information on Tdata and IApproach, please call 1-800-783-2827 or (614) 885-1169, or visit www.tdatacorp.com.