Comparing Innovation Aviation and Aerospace to Other Industries

This two-part article series will explore and compare how innovation in the aerospace/aviation industries compares to the automotive market (Part 1) and the electronics/software industries (Part 2). Originally envisioned as a single article, the vastness of information identified in our research clearly dictated two parts necessary to cover the subjects properly. The intent of this article series is to identify several emerging technologies in disparate industries that crossover or influence aerospace products.

Automotive Industry Has Stepped Up Its Game

The automotive market has surpassed aviation in terms of new advances in recent years in many ways. A recent report from The Boston Consulting Group (BCG), a global management consulting firm, found that nearly half of the world’s top 20 “Most Innovative Companies” are automakers. Even more surprisingly, for the first time this year’s top 20 list included more automobile manufacturers than technology companies, with Airbus and Boeing only ranked 33rd and 34th respectively. GE was ranked twelfth on the strength of its overall product line. (View the interactive chart for yourself at https://www.bcgperspectives.com/most_innovative_companies.)

Fourteen automakers are included in BCG’s top 50 innovative companies, compared to four years ago when only eight were included. This result is amazing considering how advanced the aerospace market is in general, and how quickly new advances in communications, manufacturing and electronics are making their way onto aircraft. A major part of the BCG survey content came from querying international executives, so there might be some built-in bias regarding certain industries. That said, let’s look at how automotive innovations as of late stack up against aviation.

A Quick Look at Recent Innovations in the Automotive World

In the past few decades, ideas from aerospace typically and eventually found their way into cars and trucks. Examples are the use of aircraft anti-skid system algorithms being licensed for use in automotive, which resulted in today’s anti-lock braking systems (ABS), and various types of reduced-weight materials and metal alloys that made their way from aircraft and rockets into ground vehicles. Other examples include drive-by-wire or steer-by-wire, fuel cells, lithium ion batteries, protective coatings and electronics control systems, just to name a few. In decades past, many of the automotive companies purchased aerospace firms to get access to cutting-edge technology and diversify away from the cyclical automotive market (usually with disastrous results, since aerospace is just as cyclical). It has been well-documented how U.S. Department of Defense military projects launched many of today’s commercially successful products (like microwave ovens, GPS, semiconductors and drones) and still continue to do so.

There has been more action on the automotive front, especially when one considers how vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) are eerily similar to NextGen and its associated technologies. We will discuss this in more detail later.

There are many parallels to key advances in autos when compared to earlier aerospace work. Now more research and development dollars are spent for ground transportation rather than in aerospace as the chart (from a recent Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers report) reveals:

The Center for Automotive Research reports that approximately three to five percent of all patents granted in the U.S. are awarded to the auto industry, which translates to roughly 5,000 new patents annually. It can be argued that due to the large number of autos, trucks and motorbikes in comparison to aircraft that this spending gap is appropriate, but perhaps this is misleading. In 2013, the number of vehicles sold globally was 83 million, and the estimated number of GA and commercial aircraft was roughly 3,700 — detailed figures were not readily available for these estimates.

Apparently aerospace and aviation need to invest in their futures a bit more, or more young and innovation-minded talent will flock to other industries instead.

Let’s touch on a number of key recent advances in automotive and compare them to related aerospace technologies.

Connected Cars versus NextGen

A fair battle or not, since these are not exactly the same? NextGen and its predecessor technologies had a large head start on the automotive market, based upon radar technologies and air-to-ground communications directing traffic. The automotive market has used lessons learned from aviation and adapted emerging technologies well.

As aircraft will do in the NextGen environment with ADS-B/C with support from GPS, automobiles will use wireless V2V communications and send messages to each other with information about their activity (speed, location, direction of travel, braking and loss of stability). This will be via a Wi-Fi-like network with a range of 1,000 feet (or ~10 seconds at typical highway speeds). ‘Intelligent’ traffic signals or other static traffic monitoring devices are called V2I. The combination of V2V and V2I creates a dynamic traffic environment that can adapt traffic management based upon information gathered in near real time.

Where V2V/V2I has an advantage over NextGen/ADS-B/C is that it is a “mesh” network, which requires that each and every node (every vehicle, smart traffic signal, embedded road sensors and monitoring equipment) will send, collect and re-transmit communications. It is estimated that between five to 10 ‘hops’ on the mesh network would quantify traffic conditions a mile ahead. This has the potential to provide significant warning to drivers approaching bottlenecks and provide them with time to possibly take action, as well as allow traffic management centers to manage traffic flow better by adjusting traffic lights more efficiently.

Safety issues will also be addressed since connected vehicles will have some warning of another car running a red light or stop sign or veering into a lane, and take automatic action before a driver can react to such an event. This concept crosses over to self-driving vehicles. .

V2V is in its early testing phases and is clearly behind NextGen in maturity, but has the potential to be more useful once it reaches a critical mass of vehicles with the technology deployed and infrastructure installed. NextGen might eventually have to take a few lessons from this set of technologies.

Reducing Emissions and the Use of Alternate Fuels

Aviation has come a long way in experimenting with renewable/alternate fuels to reduce the reliance on fossil fuel, as well as combat the issue of aircraft emissions contributing to global warming. This has been accelerated thanks to funding from various governments. We will see how the collapse of oil prices will affect these efforts. There have been a few experiments with various types of electrical aircraft (which includes solar, fuel cell, etc.) but these have been rather isolated experiments.

Automobiles such as the electrically-powered Teslas, hybrids such as the Toyota Prius, and fleets of natural gas or propane-powered buses and trucks have started to make some headway. These are all important and needed solutions but the next generation of vehicles will not need dedicated, traditional batteries as we know of them today.

Nanotechnology scientists are developing lightweight supercapacitors that can essentially be formed as body panels, thus reducing much weight from a vehicle. These body panels will have the capability to hold much higher charges, providing more power to the driver (no more jokes about a Prius holding up traffic), a faster charge time, and a possible elimination of many expensive rare-earth metals upon which most higher-end batteries depend today. These panels could conceivably make better use of captured energy produced by regenerative braking and extend the range of a vehicle. Early versions of these supercapacitors might need to be combined with lithium batteries to be economically feasible initially, according to recent reports.

Once the safer use case of powering a ground-based vehicle with these supercapacitors is demonstrated, you can see how not only smartphones, tablets/computers and thousands of other commercial electronics devices would benefit from this, but this would greatly alter designs of satellites, drones and perhaps even aircraft.

Driver-Assist Technologies Which Could Be Applied to Aircraft

Advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) assist the driver in the driving process, and these have been improving constantly. When combined with the earlier-mentioned V2V/V2I communication systems, ADAS will assist in potentially evading accidents by not only alerting a driver to potential problems, but also by taking control when needed. Safety-focused systems can provide automated braking, alerts to dangers or emerging events, maintain proper lane control and provide vision on blind spots, among other features. The use of various types of sensoring technology as illustrated in the diagram borrowed from a recent report on automobile innovation illustrates some of the key capabilities being worked on, or available today.

Why is this of interest to aviation? If these solutions can be provided for automobiles economically, why can’t they be adapted to aircraft and tied into aircraft control systems? There is little reason besides the lack of impetus.

Many incidents that result in damage to aircraft happen on the ground and many can be avoided. Imagine if aircraft wing tips used some form of ‘blind spot detection’ or even a ‘parking assist solution’, how many taxiing accidents could be avoided entirely? What if such automotive solutions adapted for aircraft use could be tied into a smarter control system (such as those starting to enter luxury cars today) that brakes for you? What if it steered you away prior to you noticing the need to do so?

Imagine if ground support equipment at airports adapted some of these solutions, such as V2V, blind spot detection and parking assistance. We could possibly eliminate many accidents where aircraft are damaged by GSE. This requires airports and MROs to also support the use of automotive technologies and work with aerospace companies and aircraft operators to find ways to deploy interdependent solutions (sort of an expanded NextGen for ground operations).

Time To Accelerate Changes

While we cannot entirely adapt all of these automotive technologies, aviation can certainly use some of these as they mature. Let’s use the large R&D investment made by the automakers and allow the next generation of aerospace engineers, pilots and support personnel to use  novel advances to move aerospace into the next era more quickly.

Aerospace and aviation have depended upon government (particularly military) funding for many innovations and such investments have paid off for everyone involved. With every new breakthrough, our lives are bettered, jobs are created and profit and taxes are paid out, so government involvement in far-off technologies that might not appeal to shorter-term outlooks of investors is needed.

This comes with a price. Anytime government entities are involved, the pace of change slows down and becomes entangled in red tape and sometimes inertia. Increased global competition pits companies against one another and entire countries are targeting job-creating industries such as aerospace. In order for the U.S. to compete, we need to unshackle our industry and let it get back some of the mojo that it lost in the golden era of aviation when innovative people flocked to designing, building and operating aircraft, rockets and other things that fly. We have elements of this with companies such as SpaceX, the dozens of drone manufacturers and some of the emerging space-focused firms that hope to build orbiting hotels, mine asteroids and bring people up to orbit for a joyride. More is needed if we hope to maintain the lead we have as a country in this important industry.   

Part 2 of this series will explore some of the recent advances in electronics and software and how this might influence aerospace.

John Pawlicki is CEO and principal of OPM Research. He also works with Information Tool Designers (ITD), where he consults to the DOT’s Volpe Center, handling various technology and cyber security projects for the FAA and DHS. He managed and deployed various products over the years, including the launch of CertiPath (with world’s first commercial PKI bridge). John has also been part of industry efforts at the ATA/A4A, AIA and other industry groups, and was involved in the effort to define and allow the use of electronic FAA 8130-3 forms, as well as in defining digital identities with PKI. His recent publication, ‘Aerospace Marketplaces Report,’ which analyzed third-party sites that support the trading of aircraft parts, is available on OPMResearch.com as a PDF download, or a printed book version is available on Amazon.com.