TAI was selected to develop and build the new T129 ATAK helicopter, with AgustaWestland as the primary partner. The ATAK program was begun to meet the Turkish Armed Forces’ requirements for an attack and tactical reconnaissance helicopter. The T129 is the result of the integration of Turkish developed high-tech avionics, airframe modifications, and weapon systems onto the combat proven AgustaWestland A129 airframe, with upgraded engines, transmission and rotor blades.

It is in use by the Turkish Army, and is being offered to other services. Developing the new T129 ATAK helicopter required the creation of staggering amounts of technical documentation, which TAI was formatting in the international S1000D standard. S1000D is an XML specification for preparing, managing, and using equipment maintenance and operations information, specifically for aerospace, defense and capital-intensive equipment applications. The S1000D standard is supported internationally, and specifically by the Aerospace & Defense Industries Association of Europe (ASD) and the Aerospace Industries Association of America (AIA).

Adopting a standardized approach leads to significant benefits in time to market, cost savings in the authoring process and interoperability across the Aerospace community. TAI had authored documentation in the Arbortext CSDB content management system. Dakota developed a system that converted the nightly export of SGML S1000D content to XML. From a native XML database, Dakota developed an XSL-FO transformation that automatically publishes the XML content to PDF. The end result is that TAI can produce the whole set of S1000D technical manuals for the T129 ATAK with the push of a button.