Aviation’s digital estate is a complicated landscape, and as new technologies including AI are introduced to the mix it will get only more complicated. To find the lay of the land on the digital estate, and to scan the horizon to find out what’s coming next, we sat down with Jennifer Schopfer, president for connected aviation solutions at RTX’s Collins Aerospace.
“Aviation is an industry that adopted digitisation long before the term existed,” Schopfer tells us. Starting from mainframe systems to a worldwide complex network of routers and radio stations that enable mission critical communications, the aviation ecosystem is built on layers and layers of historical and transformational technologies.”
As a result of these layers, and the decisions that created them, the many elements of aviation’s digital estate evolve at different speeds, driven by multiple, often competing, factors.
“For example, the maturity of mobile platforms is an accelerator for the sensors and edge device element. Cloud computing — especially the ability to define anything as code (XaC) — enables transformation in the core computing hardware. These have had direct impact on airline operations, by enabling more insights to frontline staff and bringing in operational and cost efficiency. The air to ground and ground to ground infrastructure has had a traditionally slower pace of new technology infusions and the traditional mechanisms continue to provide a quality of service that’s unmatched by evolving technologies.”
Five elements — in some cases groupings of elements — make up aviation’s digital estate:
- core computer hardware, owned or leased, memory and storage, operated or on an as-a-Service basis
- applications, from operations to air traffic management, passenger service, baggage, cargo, airport operations, flight deck, and cabin, including the arrival of AI-enabled apps
- data, including raw, processed and intelligence
- sensors and edge devices, on aircraft, ground equipment, airport devices, and other elements from radar to routers, transceivers and the data protocols associated with them
- air to ground communication, including GEO, MEO and LEO satellites, air to ground, hybrid systems, ground
Of these, Schopfer says, “the most unique part is the air to ground communications. These have been purpose built for several decades to enable guaranteed communications between pilots and traffic controllers.”
Within this operational context, she notes, “aviation operations needs to take into account the wide variations in digital maturity across the world. Being global in nature, airlines need to be able to adopt the AI-driven, biometric-enabled, seamless operations in a world class airport as well as remote airports with a telex terminal as the only reliable form of communications.”
Early and deep planning of the way that new technologies will transform operations and change the digital estate is critical.
“A significant part of our digital estate planning and support revolves around ensuring the best quality of services for a wide variety of aircraft, airport, air traffic controllers and other consumers of the digital estates in the aviation ecosystem. This is both a strength and opportunity: the variety slows down the transformation, but the compatibility enables and fast tracks the transition of currently low digitalised parts of the ecosystem,” Schopfer says. “The biggest impact to operations in future is essentially being driven by classical and generative artificial intelligence technologies.”
These include the categories of responsible AI (mitigating risk, driving trust and ensuring security of AI and the technologies it interacts with) and compound AI (integrating existing algorithmic and statistical models, machine learning and large language models), both of which show early promise across MRO (maintenance, repair and overhaul), passenger flows, flight operations optimisation, and other operational areas.
“While generative AI investments from technology leaders will continue to grow, blending it with the right mix of classical algorithms, statistical models, reinforced and supervised learning can significantly boost the value of these digital assets,” Schopfer concludes. “There are several application areas across the aviation ecosystem that can benefit from democratisation of clean, reliable, trusted and right-time data — and maturity, reliability, observability and explainability of compound AI capabilities.”
From resource optimisation for operations to intelligence-driven maintenance, turnaround efficiency improvements and air traffic management flow smoothing, integrating AI with the digital estate in a trust-based, scrutinised and regulated way is a key part of aviation’s digital future.
Author: John Walton
Published: 14th November 2024
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