Within the aircraft, the Internet of Things (IoT) is set to revolutionise the cabin — the second most expensive investment an airline will make on an airframe after the engines. But what are the benefits, and who are the players?
The crux of the IoT in the aviation context revolves around connected sensors, and in seats these provide a wealth of invaluable information about how real-world passengers use seats, autonomously request fixes to problem, enable predictive maintenance before key functionality is broken, and much more.
Sensors can be installed everywhere from armrests to recline, from the tray table to the life vest container, and from whether the seat is occupied to whether the seatbelt is fastened.
As one example, take a seatback table. These are designed for a certain number of cycles of being lowered and raised, after which they need to be replaced. But there is no practical way for an airline, or indeed a maintenance service provider, to know how many times the table in seat 1A versus the table in seat 1B has been cycled. Indeed, in that example on a European full service carrier, it is highly likely that passengers will be seated in the front row window seat, 1A, on every flight, but that very few flights will have a passenger in the middle seat, 1B, since this will be a middle-seat-free Eurobusiness-style product. So replacing both tables on the same calendar cycle is wasteful, costly and inefficient.
But beyond a simple repair-me sensor, says Recaro Aircraft Seating head of strategy and products Markus Höllerer, “IoT environments on aircraft allow for collection of lifecycle data, which can be made useful during aircraft operation by applying deep learning and artificial intelligence algorithms.”
Let’s go back to our seatback table. There are massive amounts of data that an airline or seatmaker can glean from an entire fleet of seats when it comes to, for one example, table failure.
At a basic level, it might be a certain amount of cycles, allowing the airline to fix or replace a table before it breaks. With a connected aircraft and connected maintenance organisation, this can even be done automatically: every table tells the server how many times it has been cycled, and before entering into the number of cycles at which failures happen, the server instructs maintenance to replace the high-cycle tables at (say) 1A, 12B and 27C the next time the aircraft has an overnight maintenance window.
At an advanced level, the IoT can determine whether there are specific signs that a table might be about to fail. A sensor could detect an abnormal amount of pressure placed on it, for example, or link an associated problem — for our table at 1A, high cycling of the front row armrest cover, perhaps — that would mean the table is at higher risk of failure.
With enough interconnectedness, the parts can even be automatically sent from the on-site warehouse stock, and if necessary re-ordered from the manufacturer, automatically. At a time where the industry is facing a staffing crunch, this is very attractive.
And sensors aren’t just for seats: they can be used to automatically verify that safety equipment is present and functioning. This can be back-of-house safety equipment, such as a fire extinguisher in a doghouse storage area, but a particularly strong use case is on passenger lifejackets, which have an unfortunate tendency to leave the plane with light-fingered passengers.
One option is an automatically connected sensor to confirm presence under each seat. Another is the Airbus-Fujitsu SmartCheck RFID scanner, where — rather than having to bend under each seat to visually verify the presence of the lifejacket — each lifejacket has an RFID tag that a scanner can detect at a distance of a few metres.
Technology is moving from early trials to connected trials
German seatmaker Recaro Aircraft Seating was an early mover in the cabin IoT space, with trials that it branded iSeat. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the company’s Markus Höllerer tells us, “we performed in-flight trials with our partner TAP where we collected data on usage with our economy class iSeat, BL3530, during flight. This test on one aircraft was to prove on what is possible in an operational environment.”
The BL3530 is the forward seat in Recaro’s Airbus A320 family fleet, the kind used for TAP Air Portugal’s middle-seat-free Eurobusiness product. Crucially for this test, it’s not a particularly connected seat in any context outside the iSeat trial: there’s no embedded inflight entertainment, mood lighting or anything else beyond power for the passenger’s personal electronic devices.
As a result, it’s particularly well suited to research the mainstream benefits of the IoT of seats: this is the kind of seat that will read across to many other cabin installations worldwide. As a sign of where the industry is on these trials, the iSeat proof of concept wasn’t even connected: data was stored on the aircraft and retrieved every two months in a sneakernet kind of operation.
“Next generation technologies, such as open software platforms on board of the aircraft allow seat suppliers to provide extended and centralized services based on their expertise to customers for improved maintenance,” Höllerer says.“Newer aircraft have built-in data transfer capabilities. The aircraft platform must be capable of handling enormous amounts of data and there are also various upgrade solutions in the market to enable on and off aircraft data transfer. Original equipment manufacturer and Tier 1 suppliers are taking on the challenge here.”
A key element of that challenge — namely, who gets to run the connectivity backbone, which sensors and other parts of the digital aircraft plug into — is an often-controversial one, not least because that company will be in pole position when it comes to being able to analyse the data and realise its benefits.
“Currently,” Höllerer notes, “seat data is exclusively in hands of inflight entertainment suppliers from seat to ground.”
He suggests that “by adding new wireless technology throughout the cabin, additional parties can make use of seat data.”
But the data all has to get on and off the aircraft via some kind of connectivity backbone. Airframers are certainly keen to get into the game, with Airbus positioning its Skywise platform as one option. Inflight connectivity providers are another, as are key suppliers and consortia like the iCabin project, which consists of a particularly wide group including Boeing, Safran, Diehl and Airbus subsidiary KID-Systeme.
Looking towards the future, Recaro’s Höllerer suggests, “data ownership, data security and adhering to different regional privacy regulations are important to understand. In addition to security and data ownership, the integration of various cabin equipment into the IoT framework needs to be achieved. Without necessity of platform-specific development, standardisation is key here.”
Author: John Walton
Published: 30th August 2022
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No doubt all of these concepts are technically feasible. I do wonder, however, at what point they become financially compelling.
Adding sensors to a seat to measure tray deployments means adding weight and cost to the plane. Maybe not a ton, but it adds up over time. Does the benefit of replacing a tray table just before it breaks, rather than just after,
Other use case, like the life vests, make more sense. And maybe for a truly premium cabin where lack of a tray table means taking the seat out of service the value is higher. But the business case for these solutions always seems a bit light.