As with so many of the aviation industry’s processes, the digital revolution is shifting documentation and compliance away from traditional pens-and-paper methods towards electronic means. E-compliance and online documentation are the present and future of the industry, but what’s next in terms of technology — and artificial intelligence? We sat down with Paul Sandström, chief operating officer at Web Manuals, to learn more.
Inherently, “compliance within regulatory-heavy industries has always been important,” Sandström tells us. “The aviation industry is no exception and does not shy away from the opportunity to find new ways to enhance control, compliance and agility.”
However, he explains, “The digital transformation megatrend has been speeding up since the introduction of computers and the internet. COVID rapidly increased the velocity of change in terms of digitalisation and accelerated the need for everyone to increase their engagement with the new digital world. Pre-COVID, segments and regions within the aviation industry all moved towards digital compliance, but at a varied pace of urgency. During and after COVID, the whole industry is moving in the same direction, but much faster and with less choice.”
And it’s that choice — or, rather, a set of strategic and tactical choices — that determine the success or failure of digital compliance within organisations.
“It’s hard to imagine a new start-up airline without a complete digital strategy. This is something I see as a real positive as it is becoming a more effective industry, but more importantly, it makes aviation safer and more secure,” Sandström says, recommending that companies and organisations “identify the core target values from the digital strategy and review it often. Make a long-term plan and execute accordingly. Rome was not built in a day, so pace yourself. It is better to have fewer but successful initiatives than plenty of half-misses.”
As one example of a digitalisation pillar, artificial intelligence (AI) shows immense promise, but it is still very much in a nascent stage. The benefits for the compliance agenda — pattern recognition is a strong early contender for the benefits of the AI set of technologies — are encouraging, but in a highly regulated arena its adoption needs to be incremental, iterative and verifiable, not least by regulators.
In the future, “AI can potentially automate most things, which could skip the digitalisation process altogether, instead going directly to AI since it may override the use of many intelligent tools we use today,” Sandström says. “It is fair to assume that nothing will be left unaffected by AI in the long term. Everything from load efficiency, fleet planning and air traffic control will be managed through AI. There are risks associated with this, but there are also risks with the current models, such as human error.”
Candidates for early implementation include aviation manual editing and updating, as well as auditing, compliance monitoring and other verification processes. Initially, this may well be as an additional step supplementing human work, but it is likely to evolve first to mandatory automated checks and then only potentially — and, if so, likely in the far future — to AI-only work.
“It might even come to the point that regulatory authorities would require AI to ensure safety and compliance while minimising human errors,” Sandström suggests. “Remember, AI only needs to be better than humans, not perfect. However, if we are going to sober up from this ‘utopia’, it will take a while before humans are not needed to review the sometimes overload of output — from this generation of AI, at least.”
Fundamentally, though, electronic documentation and digital compliance are already the new normal in some parts of aviation, and this trend is bound to continue.
“For the airlines of 2030, ‘electronic’ and ‘digitalisation’ will be diminishing terms and instead just the reality of the current state of the industry,” Sandström concludes.
Author: John Walton
Published: 07 September 2023
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