Tech takeoff

On a wider front, career aspirants in just about every field of aviation are likely to arrive at the job interview with experience in website coding, app and algorithm creation and a healthy appetites to change things for the better.

Demand for a digitally savvy workforce has been driven by a slew of technological development from drones to air taxis, rocket with commercial payloads, bio-fuelled and automated aircraft, wayfinder-designed airports, passenger facial recognition, blockchain technology, global positioning, artificial intelligence and virtual or augmented reality travel where a simulated computer environment enables users to experience an environment by wearing special goggles and headphone or a device combing both.

Aircraft designers, airlines, airports and aviation training schools eagerly seek futurists and those with digital diligence to create the next big aeronautical thing in their bid to stay ahead of the game.

Melbourne’s RMIT University, in collaboration with Flight Data Systems, for instance, is delivering Australia’s first Remote Pilots Licence as part of a degree.

Technology is even spilling into flight menus as Air New Zealand’s latest partnership attests. The airline recently teamed up with Silicon Valley start-up, Impossible Foods to create hamburgers stacked with artificial meat patties as a choice for in-flight meals. The patties tastes like meat but aren’t thanks to high-tech laboratory wizardry with plants.

The airline went to Silicon Valley in 2016 to enlist Avi Golan, who had a raft of experience in companies such as Google, Intuit and Olive Software, to become its first chief digital officer and it has been busy since, pushing boundaries for the passenger experience.

At a CIO 100 forum in Auckland Golan said he was lured to Air New Zealand by its challenge to become the best digital airline globally.

He told those gathered that transformation was not only about technology, but creating product and experiences, focused on keeping the customer experience evolving both physically and digitally until they were one.

The goal, he said, was to take every aspect of a trip and make it out of the ordinary.

In line with this ambition Air New Zealand announced in June a partnership with Magic Leap, a US start-up developing a head-mounted virtual retinal display that superimposes 3D computer-generated images over imagery of real places and objects for projection into the user’s eye via a “digital light field”.

It has contracted London-based creative studio, Framestore to come up with a “fantastical” journey through New Zealand’s landscapes to view through the Magic Leap headgear. Passengers will get their chance to experience this on flights later in the year.

The airline also created a wristband embedded with a chip that unaccompanied children put on at check-in. Airline staff can then scan the wristband throughout the child’s journey to send text notifications to a nominated contact.

Its 3D printing that can make replacements for broken seats and the like.

And like other airlines around the world, Air New Zealand is making inroads into artificial intelligence with a goal of robots that will have meaningful conversations with passengers.

It also has a digital internship programme designed to find future digital trailblazers and foster talent in this arena.

But it’s not the only company in New Zealand creating programmes and knocking at university doors to find digital brains with a leaning to things aeronautical.

Zephyr Airworks, the New Zealand arm of US-based Kittyhawk, presently testing Cora, the first all electric semi-autonomous air taxi near Christchurch, has been canvassing universities to develop programmes tailored for graduates to work for the company.

“We are committed to building and sustaining local capability as part of our New Zealand strategy to bring Cora to market,” said Zephyr Airworks country director, Anna Kominik.

The company recently recruited it first New Zealand staff, ranging from those at the beginning of their careers to more experienced pilots and flight test engineers.

“We are looking for more people and are actively engaged with key New Zealand universities as well as talking with local iwi about promoting engineering, science and maths to young people thinking about tertiary study,” she said.

“As a company with a strong commitment to inclusivity, we want to build greater diversity in our engineering cohorts.”

Koiminik said while there were no quick fixes the goal was to achieve successful programmes so that New Zealand has every chance of being a centre of excellence in the emerging air taxi industry.

New Zealand’s Rocket Lab founder, Peter Beck said his company has 250 staff but the explosion of innovation in specialist fields had caused a “deficit of talent”.

“We have PhD courses at Canterbury University in guidance control systems as well as internship, apprenticeship and scholarship programmes,” he said.

We invest heavily in these sort of programmes.”

Paperless pilots

On the pilot front, electronic flight bag (EFB) apps on iPads instead of charts and manuals have become the norm for most of the world’s commercial airlines and are fast gaining traction on the general aviation front.

Palmerston North’s Massey University’s School of Aviation is New Zealand’s first flight school to secure Civil Aviation Authority of New Zealand (CAANZ) approval for pilot training in a paperless cockpit.

“We had to go through a long process to achieve certification,” the university’s School of Aviation senior lecturer, Dr Savern Rewiti said, citing pre-requisites such as failsafe battery back-ups for the iPads.

“There has been such a proliferation of iPad apps to help trainee pilots in the cockpit that there is now an expectation we issue them to all of our students as part of their training, much of it in iBook format,” he said.

The training school also uses Nearpod, an American interactive system where teachers can create mini-tests for students using their iPads with instant results to show how well they are doing.

“Previously we had a vague idea [about performance] by asking students a few questions but now with this instant feedback we can see immediately who is struggling and who is doing well,” Dr Rewiti said.

The school offers a pilot training degree and Bachelor of Aviation Management.

It trains students in flight planning using an Australian-developed EFB app called AvPlan.

Dr Rewiti created an app to complement it that calculates take-off and landing.

EFB’s have evolved in tandem with glass cockpits.

“Practically every new Cessna or Diamond aircraft brought into New Zealand these days have glass cockpits,” Dr Rewiti said.

Glass cockpits have introduced students to scenario-based training.

“There is always a task to be completed with this training so they must plan for it as well as the timing of the mission.

It might involve a task such as filming an airfield and taking photos for an aeronautical magazine.

“No longer is training about going out and doing some level or climbing turns.

“The basics of flying have changed.

“Scenario-based training inculcates in trainee pilots what airlines want such as considering other factors like time and fuel.”

As part of his PhD research Dr Rewiti developed a low-cost simulator with a motion platform that was certified by CAANZ in 2011. If commercialised, it would retail for between $60,000 and $80,000.

“Conventional simulators are just so expensive for flight schools,” he said, citing around $1 million for those used for student training while at the other end of the scale, commercial simulators could cost around $20 million.”

Dr Rewiti created the low-cost simulator by coupling existing PC-based technologies with quality aviation-related hardware and software systems developed by small businesses and aviation enthusiasts.

“The idea was to see how effective they could be in terms of initial pilot training as students need to log many pilot training hours, equivalent to training in the aircraft.”

He said no significant difference was found between training on the cheaper version than on conventional simulators.

“This has paved the way for more affordable and accessible flight and safety training as well as affordable testing of aircraft design in a virtual situations and in safety investigations.

“Smart simulators do all the donkey work like basic straight-level flights or turning and climbing and descent turns or stall training at a much better level than a human instructor can teach.”

The university has looked at various ways of licensing and commercialising Dr Rewiti’s low-cost simulator as well as encouraging private companies to use it, but although there had been interest from Australia and some other countries it has not yet been brought to market.

Transitioning

Training the brain to transition from an analogue instrument cockpit to glass – or in reverse, as there are still a lot of old planes in the world – has been a concern for the FAA and other aviation bodies.

At Massey’s School of Aviation a Masters student used a simulator to test both types of cockpits. He found that reverting from glass to analogue was more of a struggle than transitioning analogue-trained pilots did better transitioning to glass.

This concurs with a similar experiment done four years ago at Melbourne’s Swinburne University of Technology. PhD student Sravan Pingali did the analysis in partnership with the University of Melbourne and a grant from the Defence Science Institute. The experiment was done using sophisticated eye-tracking technology to monitor 20 volunteer airline and helicopter pilots to see how they responded to flight systems on instrument and clock analogue cockpits, compared to digital or glass cockpits using the university’s flight simulators that were able to be switched between analogue and digital instrumentation, and between helicopter and fixed-wing aircraft.

Initial results showed that experienced pilots facing an emergency situation would spend twice as much time looking at their instruments as novices.

Evidence also pointed to pilots who had trained on analogue instruments generally finding it easier to move to a digital cockpit than vice versa, more than likely because pilots using older instruments scanned them constantly in disciplined sequence to build a picture of what an aircraft was doing and constantly updating it.

The results were widely circulated to improve aviation safety.

Cockpit mindset

Dr Rewiti said today’s trainee pilots didn’t necessarily accept the instructor as the ‘sage on the stage’.

“In my day we manually flew the instrument approach,” he said.

“You have to hand fly initially to get spacial awareness but around 40 per cent of instrument approaches in training will be done by autopilot.

”Students will often question ways of doing things and ask whether there is a better way. They look for more efficient or innovative ways, whereas in the past they tended to follow instructions without too much questioning.”

Dr Rewiti predicts that in the not too distant future everything that is going on in the background on the plane that is able to be recorded, including flight parameters will be downloaded to a smart simulator, so that remedial sessions will already be geared for sorting whatever problems there might be, whether it is a holding altitude or something else on the aircraft.

“The navy does that with an artificial intelligence simulator that is based on the behaviours of its top instructors,” he said.

‘In future the nuts and bolts stuff the instructor is doing now will be done by smart simulators.’

“I think in future the nuts and bolts stuff the instructor is doing now will be done by smart simulators. The new breed of instructor will probably be dealing more with psychology and the like.”