Case Study: Airbus achieves sub-2-second, near-real-time aircraft document search and faster time-to-market with Elastic

Airbus ADNS Powering the Search for Near Real-Time Access to Aircraft Technical Documents

Airbus, the world’s largest European aeronautics manufacturer, needed to replace a legacy 2003 search system with ADNS to give roughly 80,000 internal and external users near‑real‑time access to a growing corpus of aircraft technical documents (about 6 TB and 2 billion fragments), handle 3,000 queries per minute, enforce fine‑grained access rights, and meet a strict two‑year time‑to‑market goal with sub‑2‑second response SLAs.

Airbus deployed the Elastic Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana, X‑Pack) on an active/active redundant infrastructure (25 nodes per data center) with Platinum support to provide real‑time indexing, monitoring, and secure access. The result: a pilot in 14 months and full delivery within the two‑year target, query responses under 2 seconds, near‑100% availability, automated rights management, and a scalable platform ready to absorb future document growth.

Airbus

François Bedin

IT Project Manager