Identifying the best of the aviation industry’s many new initiatives — especially across the many regions of aviation innovation — is a fascinating task. The Toulouse-based Excellence Club Aerospace aims to highlight innovative ideas, and its recent Excellence Club Awards underlined the industry’s focus on sustainable flight, the importance of connectivity, artificial intelligence, aviation’s digital future and more. We sat down with the club’s chief executive officer Nadia Didelot to learn more about this year’s winners, as well as the trends she and the rest of the club’s judging panel are seeing around this year’s entrants and the wider industry.
The Excellence Club Aerospace awards prizes for initiatives within green aviation, innovation, artificial intelligence, connectivity/Internet of Things, plus an inspiring student category. Within the sustainability category, Nadia Didelot tells us, there are many runners and riders, but also some that are less persuasive when it comes to inherent sustainability and overall practicability.
“Many sustainability innovations are impressing us,” Didelot explains, “but the one we are technically questioning is the passenger e-VTOL benefit and market. We wonder about the size of this market, given the numerous restrictions about its use — aerial routes, professional pilots, flight duration including vertical takeoff and landing with batteries, etc. It seems to us there are too many projects for [such a] small market [that is] yet to be identified.”
Indeed, this category of largely new entrants to aviation (call it advanced or urban air mobility, electric or other VTOL aircraft, urban taxis, or what you will) seems to be encountering both new investment and the realities of aircraft development at an increased rate.
Inherent to the issues being faced in this segment is the battery power to weight problem, in some ways akin to the ‘burning fuel to carry fuel’ issue with longer-range commercial aircraft, but here linked to the design, range and capability of the new generation of advanced air mobility aircraft.
The question of how to power the future of aviation remains a contentious one, with much work under way to examine both the technical capabilities of the various prospective technologies — including hydrogen combustion or fuel cells, more sustainable aviation fuels, battery-electric power, hybrids, and more — and which segments of the aviation market they suit best.
“On energy,” Didelot suggests more widely, “hydrogen seems to us a better route than carrying tons of batteries but hydrogen is unfortunately far away. Assuming we could produce sustainable aviation fuel in an efficient way, this may be an interesting alternative. Even the car industry is now questioning itself about going 100% electric vs sustainable aviation fuels or equivalent.”
Moving to aviation’s digital future, Didelot highlights the issues around early and current generation artificial intelligence and how it fits in with human factors. She notes that the use of machine learning and especially deep learning can be helpful — but can only be helpful if it is placed appropriately within the aviation context. Didelot explains that it “cannot be certifiable [owing to the] inability for a human to understand step by step the way the result is [produced].”
Didelot notes that the industry is “following applications on deep learning — and some are clever ones — as well as what is going on with ‘explainable AI’, which could be certifiable by definition. This field is at the beginning of its growth.
When it comes to connectivity, meanwhile, 2022 has seen much discussion about the capabilities of low earth orbit (LEO) satellites, not least the use of Starlink in Ukraine. Here, Didelot notes, there is the potential for a great unlocking of capacity.
More widely in the digitalisation sphere, she notes, there is much room for companies outside the US and China to put forward innovations in the sphere of data processing technologies, including cloud provision, data lakes, and so on.
“Connectivity and the Internet of Things will grow a lot as soon as we will have affordable internet through LEO satellites,” Didelot concludes. “Current innovative projects can be clever but will only take a great dimension with the forthcoming LEO satellites constellation arriving massively on the market.”
The 2022 winners: sustainability, connectivity and more
In the green aviation category, the winner was Thales’ Flights Footprint estimator, which objectively measures the climate impact of flights using new modelling and academic research. It includes both direct carbon dioxide and non-CO2 emissions, and takes into account aircraft trajectories when calculating total emissions — critical to our fullest understanding of the overall, holistic impact of flights on our environment.
On the innovation award side, AirBusiness Academy (a part of Airbus) took home the gong for its Civil Aviation Carbon Neutrality training programme, bringing together more than a dozen participants across nine companies in the aviation value chain including airlines, airports and suppliers. Critically, the programme was focused on end-users: identifying their needs, using simulation tools including its AirManager methodology, and evaluating the impact of each measure.
The artificial intelligence gong went to German company Iwiation for its aerodrome surveillance tool iwiAI, which records, classifies and documents anything located on the airfield site — together with local ADS-B and FLARM data — sending information and real-time alerts to the aerodrome operator in the event that action is needed. The system can also produce aerodrome operations reports.
On the inflight connectivity and IoT front, the winner is a project from Collins Aerospace, easyJet and Airbus that created an ecosystem of flight operations data, covering real-time data to and from the flight deck, the cabin, the flight control tower, and the airline’s on-the-ground operations teams. The project aims to improve flight operations efficiency (including trajectory-based improvements, and leading to emissions reductions), maintenance operations (including predictive maintenance, and thus improved operational reliability) and onboard service.
The student category winner is the Neamine Project, identifying asteroids containing rare elements including platinum group and rare earth metals, with an eventual intention of enabling asteroid mining — rather neatly, given the awards ceremony took place in Toulouse’ B612 Centre, named for the asteroid on which Antoine de St Exupéry’s eponymous little prince lived.
Author John Walton
Published 17th November 2022
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