What the industrial internet means for the aviation sector

The Industrial Internet could be poised to save airlines billions. According to a report from McKinsey Global Institute, the potential economic impact for the manufacturing sector alone could be somewhere between $900m and $2.3bn by 2025. Along with the energy sector, aerospace is very much in the forefront of this transformation.

Air Asia, for example, used GE’s Flight Efficiency Services to save $10m in fuel costs in 2014, according to Raghvender Arni, senior director of platform strategy at big-data analytics vendor Pivotal. A JetBlue Airways pilot project also saved a quarter of a million dollars in a year by optimising one route to avoid bad weather on flights between Florida and California.

“The Internet of Things [IoT] is embedding functions into airplanes to improve manufacturing quality, track planes more accurately and reduce flight delays,” says JP Provencher, senior director of solution management at PTC. “But the low-hanging fruit is diagnosing jet engines and systems to detect maintenance issues and reduce service lead time.”

The aviation manufacturing floor is another beneficiary. “IoT can boost shop-floor productivity by 5% to 8% by connecting all tools, equipment and systems,” says Provencher. His company is currently working with Airbus on an Industrial Internet project that integrates thousands of shop-floor tools and systems to boost production and improve manufacturing quality.

One of the most promising gains from the Industrial Internet, however, may lie in its applications for air-traffic management, and notably Automatic Dependent Surveillance–Broadcast (ADS-B), which uses GPS signals to determine aircraft location. While land-based ADS-B systems have been deployed across most metropolitan areas, for example, coverage over oceans and remote regions remains limited, if not nonexistent.

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, EuroControl, and companies such as Wind River, Pivotal and Aireon (part of Iridium) are working to change that by tracking flight paths from space.

Aireon, for example, is deploying some 60-odd Industrial Internet–enabled, low-earth orbit satellites around the globe to expand the reach of ADS-B. Full coverage could not only increase safety or rescue operations, it could also help save fuel by optimising altitudes and flight paths. This could result in up to $8bn of fuel cost savings per year by 2030, according to Iridium, which aims to have the space-based air-traffic management system operational by 2017.

“Instead of pulling data off planes when they land, the Industrial Internet opens the door to analysing it mid-flight to precisely tune the engine, spot maintenance items, set the best course and safely allow more planes to operate,” says Chip Downing, senior director of aerospace and defense at Wind River. The company worked with Iridium to develop the communication systems for the satellite network. “An Industrial Internet with ADS-B,” he notes, means “you don’t need a manned controller to keep flights safely separated.”

The next frontier after that will be driverless commercial planes. While distant, the idea no longer seems far-fetched: many important flight tasks, such as take-off and landing, are already largely automated, and applying the concept to cargo—rather than passenger—flights will be a natural place to demonstrate the potential for these unmanned planes.

Once these are in place, the Industrial Internet potential of aviation will be fully unleashed, and it will revolutionise the way we think about the skies.

This post first appeared on GE LookAhead. Publication does not imply endorsement of views by the World Economic Forum.

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Author: Drew Robb is a contributing writer for GE Look Ahead.

Image: The new Airbus A 380 super jumbo jet airplane stands at Frankfurt airport prior to its first passenger flight early morning, March 19, 2007. REUTERS/Kai Pfaffenbach.