Welcome to Aerospace Unplugged. Hello and welcome to aerospace unplugged a podcast dedicated to giving our listeners a behind the scenes look into all things aerospace . I'm your host, Carrie Sinclair, and today's episode is all about the connected aircraft. Have you ever wondered how it's possible to text from 40,000 feet in the air or have you wondered how you're able to stream Netflix when you're flying over the ocean? The connected aircraft makes this possible.
It allows passengers to talk stream text and more with broadband satellite communication with the connected aircraft. Honeywell has just scratched the surface. So on that note, I'd like to introduce you to today's special guest president of Honeywell connected enterprise for aerospace, Ben Driggs, and a fun fact, Ben was my boss more than 15 years ago. Welcome.
It doesn't seem that long ago to me .
Time flies when you're having fun.
Absolutely.
So you've been with Honeywell for a long time and I was explaining your career earlier and it's been pretty much all over the world. So tell us a little bit about how you got into this position.
Sure. It's been a wonderful career at Honeywell. I joined in 2004 and started off in strategic planning. Went over to engines and learned a lot about our engines product line and led that product line for a while and then did two back to back ex-pat assignments, one in China and one in Latin America in Sao Paolo, Brazil. And I like to tell people , Shanghai and Sao Paolo are two amazing dynamic cities, but they're sort of exact opposites of each other.
So I got to see two very interesting areas, but certainly learn a lot from each one of those. And most recently I came back to the US in 2016 and ran our aftermarket business and then had a chance in October to take over the connected enterprise.
It's been fascinating and a lot of ways it brings together everything that I've looked at in my aerospace career, whether it's working with large aircraft in the airline industry , business jets or defense platforms, which I've worked kind of in each one of those.
And I've worked on different parts of the airplane, whether it's the engine, the APU, the flight controls, but the connected aircraft is how you put that all together and how you take data from each one of these systems and actually help someone operate the aircraft better or how to make sure whoever is in each one of those aircraft is connected to the outside world.
And so for me, it's kind of fun because it lets you think about kind of the big ways to improve an aircraft from an overall level and not just an individual system level.
Great. Well, thank you. Great having you in the studio today. So since you're the expert, when it comes to services and connectivity, and you kind of gave us a nice description of what the connected aircraft really means where it relates to all the other products and services on the plane....How did it come about in existence?
It's an interesting one. For Honeywell in some ways I think there's an analogy. If you think about what is the connected aircraft, you kind of have to have three elements to it. And there's an analogy that everyone uses in their daily life that I think is helpful, and that's the cell phone.
So what you first have to have, is you have to have some piece of hardware that can connect, in this case the aircraft, you know, for the cell phone, it's the individual, b ut that can connect it to the outside world no matter where it is. And that's the first piece of that you have and there's different kinds of hardware that can do that.
The second piece you need to have is the ability to manage transmission of data on and off that you need bits to flow on and off and then needs to happen in a secure way. It needs to happen in a way that is how the aircraft owner and operator wants it to happen. And then once you have all that connectivity, there's a certain value just based on the ability to communicate.
But then there's a whole other set of value which says I can take this connectivity and do value added services that didn't exist before. And that's kind of like the apps. So you think about it, think about our own personal lives. You have the cell phone that connected you to everything you had, monthly data plans that became reliable and cost effective and that you could choose different plans that got you data on and off.
But then came, now that I'm connected, here's a bunch of value added things that I can do that I wasn't able to do before. So that's t he kind of the analogy that we like to use in explaining what the connected aircraft is. And the fun thing about Honeywell, we play in each one of those. So we make the hardware that connects with satellites to actually connect the aircraft anywhere it is in the world , um, and connect it with a whatever size pipe you want.
Then we have the airtime service plans that can say, we'll manage that data going on and off. We'll manage it very securely and we have different packages to meet your economic needs or your operational needs. And then we have a bunch of software analytics that actually takes all that data and can help you to improve your operations, and can help you to be safer or it can open up new things that kind of didn't exist before. So that's how it sort of is now.
All three of those, they're kind of in different stages, but those have all sort of come together to really make the connected aircraft. And for Honeywell it's a bit of, we developed this stuff on our own and we did some really interesting acquisitions. So we acquired EMS, which expanded our hardware capacity tremendously. We acquired a company called Satcom one that did the data provision on and off and have been able to expand that tremendously.
And then we've acquired some companies like Avi ASO that was doing analytical things with all this data and be able to add on and expand that a lot. So that's the cell phone analogy I think it is a useful analogy to think about what the connected aircraft is and then how Honeywell is.
We use some of our own knowledge of how aircraft work and all the different systems we already developed, plus some key acquisitions that have given us this position kind of in each one of those pillars of connected aircraft.
Okay. So we keep saying connected aircraft, but does this also apply to helicopters? What about business aviation? General Aviation aircraft, defense?
Yeah. We really think this applies to all different types of aircraft. Um, there's different equipment that's needed. Sometimes different sizes of pipes depending on which aircraft you have. But it really applies to airlines and we have the hardware as well as those , other services there.
That's where the analytical piece is probably the apps if you will, or most advanced cause airlines are big businesses and they really care about things like saving fuel , knowing when a part's going to fail before it actually fails and other things of that nature. But it certainly applies to business aviation, people who fly in business jets want to be connected. They're flying all around the globe. And so there's a tremendous market there.
And now the ability to do upgraded analytics is entering there, and it's certainly true in defense as well. It's really important for mission readiness and for people to be able to do that and it certainly applies to helicopters, u m, as well as to sort of any size aircraft.
Okay. So now I'm going to get all technical. What's the difference between air to ground (AOG) Ku band and Ka band?
Sure. Um, if you think about how a passenger is going to be able to surf the Internet and send files or get streaming services or anything else, there's, you know, a couple of different ways that you can do it. The , the kind of first thing that came to a fruition was the air to ground network, which was basically installing on cell phone towers. Started off in the United States since that was the most concentrated area of air travel and where the cell phone towers existed.
And you had put something on the bottom of the airplane that could then communicate with the air to ground network. That e nabled you to have a certain level of connectivity. It's a good solution if you fly in certain places and i t certainly was one of the first ways that people really got airplanes connected for passengers.
But then what came is what happened if we fly over water and what happens when you want to send a lot of data that basically the air to ground networks had a hard time handling. And that's when, and it took a little more technology, is let's put something on the top of the airplane that could communicate with a satellite that could be a bigger pipe and a global pipe.
The satellite was in really what you saw is while people have been talking about it for 20 years, the true broadband satellite connectivity for aircraft is really a phenomenon of the last four years where the technology really got to the point where you could have reliable connections, efficient connections that were truly global. There's different spectrum's that you can use. The Honeywell system operates on the Ka satellite networks that are up in space , called JetWave.
We developed that and got that certified about four years ago. What's amazing, it's now been in production for three and a half years and we've already shipped 1,500 units , which in a erospace time....that's a lot of units to ship over a very short period of time, w ill be over 2300 by the end of this year. And really just a tremendous amount of volume that is going out on those products.
And the great thing about Ka band is it's the true global coverage and w e're on the Inmarsat network where anywhere your airplane's going, you're going to be able to get that connection. And it's g oing t o be a high bandwidth connection. Ku is another part of spectrum and that's another area, another set of satellites, Ku satellites that you can also use for the spectrum.
And there's other ones that also come into play where most of the airplanes that people fly on today will either be a n air to ground or satellite. The air to ground again has a lot of good functions but the satellite gives you the bigger pipe and gives you the broader coverage.
So if you're flying with more than 250 passengers on a commercial flight though, wouldn't you expect the WiFi to be a little slower or can you keep the same streaming speed?
You know, our experiences on our product, is we think we can give you an office or home like experience really regardless of what size aircraft you're on, which is really quite amazing. The joke that I make with people is imagine you are in Antarctica or let's say not in Antarctica but the Arctic. Let's say you're up north because they have sled dogs.
Let's say you decide to take a sled dog ride , but let's say it was really fast select dogs and they were going at 450 miles an hour and it's minus 30 below outside. How well do you think your cell phone would work? You know, you probably wouldn't expect it to work very well. Well, what you're doing on the airplane, just to show how cool this technology is, you're going at 450 miles an hour. You are in a very remote area, up thirty thousand or forty thousand feet in the sky.
The outside temperature that this hardware has to be going in and off on is extremely cold. So, and yet we're able to keep a connection, which is 20 gigabytes per second to the aircraft. So you divide that up by the passengers and you still get a lot of megabytes in there that can really give people a fabulous experience even at those extreme environments. It really is amazing. Now what I would say is when you're a passenger, you don't think about, I'm traveling at , you know, 450 miles an hour.
You don't think I'm at 35,000 feet. You don't think outside it's minus 30.
You work at Honeywell, you might.
You work at Honeywell you might. But most people wouldn't think of that. Their expectation is it's got to work just like it does at home. And the amazing thing about, and this is why I really took the first discussion of this was in 2000 people thought they were going to launch enough satellite broadband and internet connection in 2000. Really took until 2016 where this really started to really be a reality because it is difficult technology.
It's technology that also has to be at a cost point that people can afford. And it took that long to really work and it's kind of amazing when you start to think about the environment that is involved in.
Pretty cool. So how secure is it?
It's very secure. That's another great thing about satellite technology in terms of the encryption that is used. And certainly Honeywell has a lot of experience in developing so many systems in the cockpit as well as having secure technologies and all the critical software and data transmission that we do.
Whether it's the, you know, 50% of the world's refineries that are controlled by control rooms that use Honeywell software or our position on half the aircraft in the world having a flight management system by Honeywell. All of that security and encryption background really enabled us to, we think have a great solution there. The cabin connectivity is separate from cockpit. I t's another important thing, right, as you look at it. And i t's a principle of safety there.
So it's something that we feel really confident about and now most people don't, you know, think twice of getting on an airplane and being able to log on and send emails and it's just another part of the communications network that needs to exist.
It's more of an expectation now. So does it apply to military aircraft though?
It certainly does. That's certainly an area that we're very excited about getting into and there's different requirements that exist there. But it's something that is absolutely interesting.
One of the real great examples that we have on this is with the Royal Australian Air Force, the RAF, as they're known in the industry, they i nstalled their JetWave on their C-130 aircraft a nd were able to do video s treams streaming when they're looking at things like disaster relief or other things like that or any other mission. They were very impressed and really happy with what they were able to do when y ou have a broadband connection on that really important cargo aircraft.
Very cool. So pivoting to other things that the connected aircraft does besides Wifi. How does it improve the efficiency for the aviation industry overall?
Yeah, sure. You know, that really falls into that third category of what can you do with all this data because the connected aircraft is more than, you know, surfing the Internet and sending emails to your to your boss while you're on flights. It's really about how do you take data and use it in an effective way. There's couple of examples. One is fuel consumption.
We have this product which is our flight efficiency product, which takes all the data that an aircraft produces and about how it's being used and how it's burning fuel, organizes it, runs algorithms on it, puts it in a format that an airline can actually then interact with and it makes recommendations on how can I use less fuel. We have 36 airlines that use this service.
Over 3000 aircraft, 3000 tails around the world are covered in those 36 and on average by getting an aggregation and then a recommendation based on this big data of how to use less fuel. Airlines have realized between 2 and 3% lower fuel costs and that adds up to be a lot of money. Examples are, there's ways that you can make flights more efficient.
Examples are where you can use one engine taxi instead of using both engines, all sorts of other things like that come when you aggregate all this data that previously went unorganized and then you put algorithms and data analytics behind it. You can really identify where are opportunities specific to an airline, to their operations, to in reality how they're using it and how they can save fuel . So that's really exciting. Another area is predictive maintenance.
We have been able to reduce unscheduled delays and cancellations by 40% by being able to predict when a part will fail. By again, taking all this data that is currently produced but actually organizing it and then putting data scientists to develop algorithms to analyze it and then be able to predict when something is going to fail. And also when something does fail to tell you what exactly has failed so you can actually fix it in a more efficient manner.
Cathay Pacific was one of our pilots wh ere w e did this on the APU system and they again, during this time period of the pilot, h ad a 40% reduction in unscheduled delays and cancellation, which is something that's good for the airline, good for the passenger, good for the airport, good for everybody involved.
Great. So now that we've kind of talked about how the connected aircraft came about, let's just talk about the future of connectivity and what can you tell us about the future of the connected aircraft? What's next?
Yeah, there's endless ways you can take all of this data and figure out new insights into how to make the aircraft more efficient, make your operations more efficient, to how to make it safer. So there's a couple, I think of areas , that is really going to be exciting going forward.
First it's really taking this predictive maintenance and predictive capability and being able to fully implement it across all the systems on the aircraft and then fully implement the implications of that on your inventory and your maintenance practices. And that's going to unlock the next stage in reliability for aircraft and in efficiency for maintainers of aircraft. So that I think is one area.
Another area is you're going to figure out, once you have all this data, you're going to be able to look in new areas that previously were hard to optimize. You can figure out, I actually can optimize it and that's going to mean that much better operations. I'll give you a good example is we've been able to take some of the same technology we had on airplanes and now apply it to airport ground handlers.
A lot of, of course it's not just how the aircraft functions, that determines how quickly you can turn an aircraft or whether an airport is ru n e fficiently, but there's lots of other things going on.
And so we signed a contract with Swissport, the largest ground handling company in the world and are just rolling out now pilots of how do you do the same technology of understanding, how is all the ground support equipment moving around the airport, how does it interact with an aircraft at turn and what can you do to make that more efficient? It's going to open up whole new areas that previously were thought, well you just have to accept it.
It's not unlike we get as consumers where, you know, taxis, you know, you just accepted well it's hard to find a taxi or get one a certain times. Now when data and being able to know where everything was was ubiquitous, suddenly it wasn't if you are in some remote or some random location, it wasn't call a taxi company to essential distributor and they sent something from central distribution. You obviously get onto your Lyft or Uber or whatever and something's there in five minutes.
That's the type of thing is you're going to be able to unlock beause all of this data is going to be able to be transmittable and organized to really understand how to do things more efficiently. Also, as you think about the future in passenger connectivity and pilot connectivity in another part we didn't talk about was we make products that are used in the cockpit for voice and critical safety messages and other things. There's new satellite technology.
New satellite technology that can make the cost of transmitting those things on and off less which is always good and also can make the latency issue even better. It's currently, you don't really notice it, it feels like a great experience, but you obviously always want to make that so it's the shortest latency and the most amount of data for the lowest cost.
The costs are pretty effective today as a frequent traveler, I choose the monthly option on two different airlines actually where I pay, you know, $45 a month and have unlimited surfing and ability to send emails and do work on, t he aircraft, which is phenomenal. Of course, as you th ink about in the future, new tec hnology sh ould lower costs even more, can bring even greater cost points there and that includes new satellite technology.
What about the urban air mobility market? So this is really talking about like air taxis.
Yeah. When you think about the ability for those aircraft to be able to have their passengers be sending data on and off, that's going to be important there as well.
But especially about for the aircraft to be able to send data on and off and then f or data analytics to help maximize the efficiency of those fleets, kn ow w here they're supposed to go, when they're supposed to go, t hat is something connectivity will be even more important when it's not a scheduled flight and being able to have data analytics, I c a n tell you something's wrong is even more important when it's not okay, I know I'm going to point A to point B at X time when it's more dynamic
dat a is ev en more important and the ability to know exactly what's happening is even more important. In air mobility when you think about it, it's just sort of inherently more dynamic and more variables, more things can change on a basis tha n yo u know, scheduled commercial flights today. So for that need for data to becoming on and off and then smart analytic tools to sort of know what to do is going to be more important.
Well, thank you. I appreciate you joining us today. I have to say it was very educational for me. But one question that we ask our guest at the end of the show is how do you unplug at the end of the day?
Oh boy. Um, well I am a native Arizonan and I certainly love to be out in the desert. So, probably more than anything , hiking and walking around my desert home. Also with still relatively young boys, they've gone from being boys to being teenagers now or in the early stages of that. That certainly keeps me occupied as well.
Great. Well thank you. I appreciate your time.
Thank you.
All right, everyone. Once again, my name is Carrie Sinclair and thank you for listening to aerospace unplugged, a podcast dedicated to providing our listeners with a behind the scenes look into all things aerospace. To find out more about the connected aircraft, visit our website @aerospace.honeywell.com where you can read more from Ben's blog, the full potential of connected aerospace. We've just scratched the surface. Safe travels and we'll see you next time.