Where Will Our Industry Be in 20 Years’ Time?

Whisper it, but there’s never been a better time to enter the industry.

None of this came as a surprise to William Horrocks, the chief executive of Aviation Australia. The business offers engineering, cabin crew, pilot and remote pilot training for aspiring individuals looking to pursue a career in the aviation industry, and this year celebrates its 20th anniversary. Its launch came after the last major shock to hit the sector, the 9/11 terrorist attacks. “We had individuals wanting to train with us throughout the disruption from COVID-19,” he insists. “There’s been no decrease in desire or interest of people wanting to enter into the industry. Demand continued.

“I think it’s because aviation is exciting and on that leading edge of technology. The digital transformation has been ongoing leading to many changes, such as remotely piloted systems delivering coffee in Queensland. These changes are occurring rapidly, and for us, the challenge is to ensure we’re agile enough to skill individuals so they can work productively in the new environment. It’s an exciting time for the industry.”

“People have this perception that aviation is struggling because they see the Kangaroo or the Virgin tail sitting on the fence at the main airports, but it’s only a tiny part of the industry,” agrees Leif Mawson, who is responsible for technical and engineering training at the business. “Domestically, the forecasts are that the industry is going to transport more people and freight than they did in 2019. There’s pent up demand.”

It’s a sentiment shared by Russell Burgess, who works with Aviation Australia to oversee Qantas’ engineering pipeline program, bringing recruits to the airline. “I’ve been in the industry a long time,” he says. “And I remember in 1983 being told the best days of this industry are behind us! So, you’ll always find someone coming up with the doomsday scenario. The sector has survived many things, and even when you go back to recent times, there’s been 9/11, SARS, the GFC and Bird Flu. I was told years ago, ‘When things are on the way down, hang on, and when things are on the way up, really hang on!’”

In fact, airlines are responding in ways we couldn’t have fathomed not long ago. At home, Virgin Australia has gone on a recruitment drive to hire 400 more staff, announced it will increase its current fleet of 737s by nine and placed an order for 25 next-generation 737 MAXs. Qantas appears to be on the brink of finally acquiring a fleet of ultra-longhaul A350-1000s to fl y Project Sunrise routes between London and New York to Australia. And Wing (a Google Alphabet subsidiary) drone delivery in Logan, Queensland, and the ACT is now so innovative the devices can pick up parcels from shopping malls and deliver them to residents’ houses. These advances will require not just pilots but also engineers and support staff to be upskilled with new training to make these technological leaps a reality.

A remotely piloted future
Ryan McMahon is the chief remote pilot and head of training of Aviation Australia’s RPAS division. He’s seen the sector transform from being sneered at by perplexed outsiders to one now utilised by almost every industry in the country. “If you think back to four or five years ago, I think there was considerable hesitancy from the public as to what drones were and how they were being utilised,” admits McMahon. “People worried, ‘Are these devices being used to monitor me?’ But now, we’ve trained thousands of remote pilots around Australia and assisted in onboarding over a hundred businesses, allowing them to integrate RPAS into their operations. We’ve seen rapid growth in the sector, but we know that the surge isn’t anywhere near finished. Some of the latest Deloitte predictions, for instance, show a possible 300 percent growth in drone economy-wide impact and job creation potential in Australia over the next five years. And that’s just increasing up to 2040.

“Why? Well from around 2015 onwards, we saw that the technology could be used in a viable, broader commercial sense. Not just in the military, and the technology had developed so we weren’t limited to flying something that would stay in the air for seven or eight minutes and require a lot of manual input. Suddenly, we found we could now integrate sensor controls and flight controls on attached phones or tablets and utilise programmable waypoints and data capture options with cloud-based processing platforms. These advancements have come as we’ve also seen the cost of acquisition come down by a factor of 10. So, we’ve seen a growing number of industries now able to implement this technology with their existing skill sets and new use cases identified.

“If you look at the development curve of the RPAS industry, we’ve come through the initial infancy and development, and we’re currently in the expansion phase. We’re seeing continued technological development, social acceptance and a harmonisation with the regulatory side of things, the civil aviation safety authority is proactively working with industry to define and refine current and future legislative requirements. The technology is here, and I think the population is starting to appreciate the advantages, we’re starting the journey toward passenger carrying urban air mobility vehicles!’

COVID was, perhaps perversely, hugely beneficial to the drone industry, and the sector was one of the few to record growth in the last two years. More specifically, it benefited because of the devices’ unique ability to deliver packages without the risk of transmission and their ability to capture data at a larger scale. “As we’ve seen workforces contract with restrictions and travel limitations, there’s been an increase in workload needed with fewer people,” says McMahon. “RPAS technology has enabled businesses to increase their efficiency, capability and operate more safely.”

Aviation Australia was quick to spot the sector’s potential. Ten years ago, as the business celebrated its tenth anniversary, the board observed that remotely piloted aircraft could evolve into becoming the dominant form of aviation one day. “We knew we had to be involved,” says Horrocks. And while drones might now be known as small, buzzing devices in the sky, remotely piloted tech will inevitably begin to merge with more traditional aviation over the next 20 years.

“In the future, there’s no reason why freighters, whether they’re rotary or fixed-wing, can’t move across domestic or international borders autonomously,” predicts Horrocks. “There’s no reason why there needs to be an individual in the cockpit. This is where it’s going. But you’ll still need individuals in the loop to monitor safety and be able to react accordingly. But I also think passengers will always want to be in an aircraft with a pilot. There’s always going to be that psychological element that is
difficult to control.

“If there’s a shortage of pilots, then economies of scale will drive towards an autonomous future. We’ll ask, ‘Where do you need them?’ It’s already happening in a military context, but it’s also happening to some extent in a commercial context, but not necessarily on a wide scale.”

It won’t just cause a shake-up of training or recruitment of pilots, but engineers and maintenance professionals, too. “There’s no reason why drones can’t be tasked for inspection work. Big data and analytics mean they can be better than the human eye at spotting if something is going amiss. And then they alert the human in the loop who can interrogate further. They can be used in so many different applications that you have to ask, ‘Where does it end?’”

Electric vertical take-off and landing vehicles (eVTOLs)
The boom in drones is taking place in tandem with advances in larger electric vehicles, or eVTOLs as they’re now. Known in the mainstream media as ‘flying cars’, Australia has quietly positioned itself as a global leader in this technology. Embraer is already planning to bring the aircraft to Melbourne by 2026, and there’s even a flying car grand Prix set to launch in SA later this year, backed by Telstra. In future, it will mean a considerable increase in new staff and skills that will be required to keep things moving forward.

“The challenge will be integrating these vehicles with crewed aircraft in conventional airspace,” says Qantas’ Burgess. “Currently this can be done on a smaller scale using autonomous algorithmic management systems, combined with a remote pilot in the loop observing and monitoring several aircraft at once. Wing and SwoopAero as examples, use systems like this with UTM integration and a range of variables auto analysed to plan the most effective and safest routes for drone delivery. But certainly, there will be humans involved in the loop – though it remains to be seen exactly what that looks like.”

Managing that transition is a predicament currently being mulled over by Aviation Australia. “It’s a tough one to gauge, but we will evolve as the technology evolves,” says Mawson. “We’ve got to be in alignment with the regulators. So as new technologies, electric aircraft, and that sort of thing, come about and develop, the regulators will need to keep pace with what they’ve got in their manual of standards.”

Ultra-long-haul aircraft
Perhaps closer to fruition is the emergence of ultra-long-haul aircraft that can travel distances that would previously require a layover. The long-delayed 777x, due to enter service next year, has a potential range of more than 16,000 kilometres, while its Airbus rival, the A350-1000, will launch non-stop Qantas flights from Sydney to London and New York. Going that far will require a step-change in training and how aviation professionals can operate aircraft safely over longer and longer timeframes.

“It goes back to the point I made earlier about aviation being on the edge of technology and continuing to develop and improve,” says Horrocks. “Once border restrictions are lifted, passengers won’t want to be caught up in hubs; they won’t want too many layovers.”

“There seems to be a big appetite for it now,” agrees Mawson. “People are prepared to fly direct from Sydney to London if they can get that flight, and the initial, ‘That’s too long on a plane’ comment will fade. Especially if the aircraft is connected to Wi-Fi, because you can work for eight hours on the plane and, if you’re up the front, you’ve got a bed where you can sleep. Today, you can get o the plane and go to meetings for a day or two days and fly back again.”

A new generation of narrowbody aircraft
Australia’s airlines are soon to be embarking on a once-in-a-generation narrowbody fleet renewal. The 737-800 that forms the backbone of Qantas’ fleet was developed in the late ’90s and has long since been surpassed by a new generation of fuel-e client aircraft such as the 737 MAX and A220. The MAX reduces fuel use and CO2 emissions by 14 per cent compared to the 737-800, while the A220 o ers 25 per cent lower fuel burn per seat than previous generation aircraft plus lower emissions. Virgin has already ordered 25 MAXs, with Qantas surveying a range of options to replace 100 aircraft by 2034.

“If you look at my journey, we went from the early Boeing 747s through the 300, 400 and SP variants, onto the 767 and then Airbus 330 in our fleet,” says Burgess. “And I guess that the separation of trades started to disappear. Where it’s considered an avionics trade today, when I started, that was only short instrument radio, you had engineer frame, now it’s mechanical. Even when you start looking at the mechanical, and the avionics, there’s becoming less and less of a separation between the trades.

“So certainly, there are some things you’ll learn on the job. There’s new aircraft, services, lots of training provided by the OEM to introduce that aircraft into service, both at a licensed level and at an AMV level. So, there’s a whole new range of technology introduced, and you have to train your staff up to meet it. Materials are the aircraft. The old 747 was aluminium alloy, and now you look at the 787 with composite carbon fibre. So again, if you look at the structures, they still can repair, but the way it is repaired is different. So those people have been trained differently, use different tools and equipment to maintain the airframe.”

The next 20 years
But as Aviation Australia moves into its next two decades, where will the industry be in 2041? “There are so many changes occurring,” enthuses Horrocks. “Even if they’re incremental in some instances. I saw recently, in the media, that they’re developing nano drones or tiny drones that can be spread across a large area and can pick up so much data based on their sensors. These things are very small, like butterflies, and don’t have a traditional engine because they are designed to float. They pick up information, transmit it, and when they hit the ground, they decompose. That’s just one example of what’s going on in the aviation space right now.

“But to build those things, to put them together, you need highly skilled people, and quite a number of them in the supply chain, to get to that point. The employment opportunities will evolve and grow with the technology to be able to match against the demand or the supply of what’s required. Aviation Australia is well placed to provide the necessary training and skills for those seeking these employment opportunities.”