[Long Beach, Calif. 06-06-14] President of TMF Associates<\/b> Tim Farrar looked out at the 300-plus aviation professionals at the inaugural Global Connected Aircraft Summit (GCA Summit) and took a guess. \u201cMaybe it\u2019s the connectivity bubble,\u201d he said, in an effort to explain the unusually dense attendance to a closing session of a first-year conference. Though Farrar didn\u2019t fully anticipate the average airline executive\u2019s interest in the myriad of questions that arose at the phrase \u201cconnecting the fleet,\u201d the two-day summit unearthed a plethora of concerns, troubling business cases and new business opportunities all around connected aircraft.<\/p>\n
While Farrar painted a bleak picture for airlines\u2019 direct revenues from connectivity services, the airlines executives themselves saw opportunity in the savings that come with operational improvements for the cockpit, customer service and ground maintenance.<\/p>\n
Gudmundur Oskarsson, director of marketing and business development for Icelandair<\/b>, saw connected-operations opportunities as an \u201cendless wish list,\u201d from monitoring crews and solving customer complaints aired on social media while still in-flight, to alerting maintenance of issues ahead of landing. \u201cThere [are] a lot of intangible things that can move the business case,\u201d he said, mentioning that Icelandair is currently working on retail applications to prevent fraud on in-flight shopping. Gulf Air<\/b>\u2019s Mohamad El Assaad, senior manager IFE & communications, agreed, \u201cthe aim is to \u2026 resolve the problem and end the complaint; fix [the customer\u2019s] problem when he\u2019s experiencing it, rather than the repercussions of the problems through Twitter, Facebook, etc.,\u201d said ElAssaad.<\/p>\n
Dan Smith, principal engineer of avionics engineering for Hawaiian Air<\/b>, an aviation executive representing connectivity uninitiated airlines, said his company is attracted to fuel savings that are possible through real-time weather data and in-flight updates to navigation charts. \u201cYou can save a lot of fuel with good communication,\u201d said Smith, adding that Hawaiian Air plans to participate in Inmarsat<\/b>\u2019s new SwiftBroadband evaluation providing free position location data off-loading services in response to the loss of Malaysia Airlines\u2019 <\/b>MH370.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe thing about SwiftBroadband is that the position data, latitude and longitude, heading [and] groundspeed are just part of the metadata that goes along with the transaction \u2014 all you have to do is do some housekeeping every minute or 15 minutes and the data is there. The Malaysia 370 loss, [which is] really tragic, could never happen [with continuous position data],\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
FedEx<\/b>\u2019s Manager of Avionics Engineering, Data Management & Communications Ted McFann, who runs extensive connectivity operations for FedEx Express\u2019 delivery operations, said the key to operational excellence is a paradigm shift in how the industry thinks about components.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe cannot treat connectivity hardware like typical avionics components, we need to treat [it] like our iPhones. We upgrade our smartphones every three to four years, and we\u2019ll need to do the same thing with our avionics components,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Etihad is also looking at both real time weather and data fraud prevention services in the near future, said Nsizwa Khumalo, Etihad\u2019s BFE program and projects connectivity program manager.<\/i> \u201cWe\u2019re looking about the possibility of weather updates updating live into the aircraft. We\u2019re looking at things like credit card certification, especially on duty free, to minimize the impact of data fraud in that area, and we\u2019ll conduct a wider exercise to look into that area,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Vendors like Gogo<\/b>, Honeywell<\/b>, Rockwell Collins<\/b> and Thales<\/b> backed up airlines\u2019 visions for operational connectivity opportunities. \u201cIt\u2019s the most underserved of the opportunities,\u201d said Dave Bijur, Gogo\u2019s vice president of airline partnerships, pricing and distribution. Thales\u2019 Stuart Dunleavy, VP marketing and customer propositions, said \u201cfrom an operational point of view, as an avionics manager as well, we\u2019re trying to help airlines find a way to monetize all of the on-flight data. We keep hearing there might be another flight services capability in Iridium<\/b> next year that might open up.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rockwell Collins, like Thales, merges the cockpit and cabin in one data pipe, according to Duc Tran, director cabin systems and IFE marketing at Rockwell. \u201cAirlines who have used [operational connectivity] save on fuel [and] all these maintenance areas. This is where the big savings come from,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
John Hajdukiewicz, director of product marketing at Honeywell Aerospace, predicted that the future of the operational connectivity market will center on leveraging the massive amounts of data connected and electrical aircraft collect. \u201cIt\u2019s not about collecting lots of data, it\u2019s about how can you make sense of that data, how can you get insights at least to something that\u2019s valuable for that end user,\u201d said Hajdukiewicz. \u201cIf someone can crack this code, that\u2019s where it\u2019s going to be.\u201d<\/p>\n
Within operations, John Craig, chief engineer of cabin and network systems at Boeing<\/b> also identified cyber security as an untapped market. \u201cConnectivity will drive cyber solutions. We live in a safety world and the whole industry is very good at it. \u2026 Cyber security is a new paradigm in aviation. We\u2019re going to have to protect the airborne and the ground interfaces,\u201d he said, also adding that businesses must find a way to get operational efficiencies, and thereby saving on the massive $680 billion a year airlines see in expenses.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
[Long Beach, Calif. 06-06-14] President of TMF Associates Tim Farrar looked out at the 300-plus aviation professionals at the inaugural Global Connected Aircraft Summit (GCA Summit) and took a guess. \u201cMaybe it\u2019s the connectivity bubble,\u201d he said, in an effort to explain the unusually dense attendance to a closing session of a first-year conference. Though Farrar didn\u2019t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":77286,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-77285","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77285"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=77285"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77285\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/77286"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=77285"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=77285"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=77285"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}