Beyond Keywords: Building an AI Assistant for Aviation Maintenance using Elastic RAG

> **Disclaimer**: This blog post was submitted to the Elastic Blogathon Contest and is eligible to win a prize. --- # Beyond Keywords: Building an AI Assistant for Aviation Maintenance using Elastic RAG --- ## 🎯 TL;DR Built an AI-powered aviation maintenance assistant using Elasticsearch's hybrid search (BM25 + vector embeddings + RRF). Achieved 30% better recall than keyword-only search and 25% better precision than vector-only. Complete working code included. **Key Technologies** : Elasticsearch 8.x, sentence-transformers, Python, RRF --- ## Introduction Aviation maintenance is a high-stakes domain where technicians need instant access to accurate information from thousands of pages of technical manuals. A simple keyword search often fails when queries use different terminology than the manual, or when the answer requires understanding context across multiple sections. In this blog post, I'll show you how to build an AI-powered aviation maintenance assistant using Elasticsearch's hyb