Featured Flyer: Panayiotis (Panos) Nicolaou

Next in our series of interviews with the people who are making the Yocova platform come alive, we talk to Panos Nicolaou, a Digital Solutions Lead at R2 Data Labs and an aviation tech evangelist.

8th April 2021

Panos leads the development of digital solutions in the area of airline safety and risk management for R2 Data Labs. He brings data analytics capability to accelerate and innovate safety solutions to assist airlines in practising proactive risk management.

Panos is an MIT Sloan MBA graduate who is passionate about innovative solutions that help companies stay ahead of competition and technological disruption. He started his career in propulsion design at Boeing Commercial Airplanes before moving into different roles of managing technology solutions that drive digital transformation in airline operations. He joined Rolls-Royce in 2015 and initially led efficiency management engagements with APAC airline customers. In 2017 he moved on to focus on airline safety.

He balances data science with domain knowledge, designing solutions that assist airlines to improve operational efficiency and risk management.

What’s your focus at R2 Data Labs?

The R2 Data Labs team is all about driving innovation through Rolls-Royce using digital technology and solutions. We’re very much focused on external collaboration, building strong relationships within airlines in Singapore and the surrounding regions.

Through some of the engagements and services we provide, we bring knowledge back into the company so that we can drive development of better products for these and other customers – it’s very much a circular approach that improves Rolls-Royce products and solutions for our current and future customers.

I’ve been working with R2 Data Labs for almost six years. I initially led an energy-efficiency engagement for Singapore Airlines which was focused on fuel saving. My role looked at innovating existing products using analytics, empowering pilots to make better decisions for fuel saving based on near real-time data.

Now I work in the safety space, bringing in analytics to improve safety and to innovate with products. Some competitors offer similar solutions, as well as emerging start-up companies where change is increasingly being driven by technology and analytical capabilities.

Panayiotis (Panos) Nicolaou, a Digital Solutions Lead at R2 Data Labs

How does Yocova help with your work?

I’ve been a member of Yocova from the very early stages and I see it as a great way to democratise digital transformation in airlines. In Yocova, not only can you engage with different airlines but also extend the ways you can interact with them, while also observing how the community interacts with each other. We can ask airlines directly how they share data, what they are looking for, so that they can better support key decisions with analysis.

A particular area of interest is the move within the industry from the traditional Safety Management (Safety I) to what the industry now calls Safety II. In the past the industry has been driven by Safety I, which is the process of learning and improving safety from incidents and accidents, i.e. learning from our errors. Now we have access to so much more data and are able to better analyse the data we have, the industry has identified the opportunity to move towards Safety II, which means learning from ALL data and taking safety and risk management to the next level.

We are no longer just learning from accidents, we are anticipating and looking for solutions to issues before they arise. Yocova is a great space to explore how we do this – we can look at what airlines need to support this shift, and we can use the information we gather to design bespoke solutions specifically for the industry.

What are the benefits of Yocova membership?

Taking an active part in the Yocova community is an effective way to get your message out there, and to become involved in industry-specific discussions.

For me it’s an opportunity to connect with our industry community in a much more efficient way and also to create valuable connections within the community that before were not possible in a physical-only world.

From an R2 Data Labs perspective, it’s very powerful to be a part of such a community and to get the vibe or feedback from the market, to understand industry challenges and to look for solutions to major issues. We (Rolls-Royce) become better when we see the world through the eyes of our customers.

The platform offers genuine opportunities to collaborate with anyone active on it (airlines, software companies, regulators etc.) and to look for potential partners among the innovative companies that continue to join the membership.

How can Yocova deliver against emerging issues?

There are so many issues for the industry in terms of how you restart after the last year and how to get airlines operating at the same levels as before the pandemic. Issues that haven’t been seen before or that hadn’t been anticipated concerning safety, engineering, maintenance and flight operations.

Before the pandemic restricted business travel so severely, airlines had forums, conferences, face-to-face meetings where issues could be openly discussed. Of course, almost all of these are no longer happening.

So what do people do instead?

Yocova is the right place to digitally connect with the right people in real time. I would love to see the platform hosting conferences and bringing industry bodies, airlines and others together to facilitate some of those discussions.

In the industry there is always a lot of talk about regulations being driven by governments and industry bodies – sometimes everyone is talking but the next steps aren’t clear or co-ordinated. These are typically major issues that need to be addressed collectively by all the stakeholders, whether they are OEMs, airlines, or competitors needing to collaborate. Yocova is in a strong position to enable that.

Which areas of Yocova have been most useful to you?

Groups are the strongest and most appealing area for me at present, with people easily understanding the metaphor of group discussion from similar concepts on platforms such as LinkedIn.

I’m the owner of the Moving from Safety I to Safety II group on Yocova, which has 140 members. We started with the underlying assumption that everyone wants and can see the benefits of Safety II, and now we have started to bring together people from the airlines to answer questions about how best to approach this shift.

Another group I started more recently is dedicated to exploring how to achieve sustainability from a flight operations perspective, where again there is the attempt to discover how the airlines are thinking, what they want to be measuring and how we can face the challenges this poses.

Getting engagement in the groups and making conversations happen is key to finding industry-wide solutions to the major challenges we are facing, and we can make good progress in these dedicated areas.

The challenges idea is something a little different that enables users to get responses to more specific questions. It’s a way to garner more involvement and faster responses to specific challenges, and to prompt a much more focused industry discussion.

There’s also excellent potential to use Data Rooms in conjunction with Challenges. Data is securely kept, but across the industry there has sometimes been a reluctance to share it. Having a secure environment to do this enables us to build trust and to achieve meaningful transactions.

While airlines might show some reluctance to share data with other parties, being comfortable that it is safe and secure through Yocova will help to enable data and information sharing within the industry. This will allow start-up companies to access operational data for the first time, fostering the strong sense of collaboration that makes innovation possible.

What do you think the future holds for Yocova?

Yocova has the potential to be a very powerful and successful platform. Moreover, the capability to share data on Yocova, I believe, holds the potential for more growth and greater collaboration in the future. I look forward to being an active part of its future success.

For more information or to collaborate, you can contact Panos on Yocova via his personal profile. Alternatively you can join Panos in the discussion group he manages: Moving from Safety I to Safety II.

 

Top Photo by Jon Flobrant on Unsplash

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