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What are we trying to achieve in business aviation industry? I believe we can re-energize the industry by bringing in more really smart and creative people to launch a new renaissance of aviation. How can we do that? We must reduce costs significantly so that we can move down the marketing pyramid and profitably serve the next lower tier of customers. This move will require some innovation because I am pretty sure that if it were possible, someone would already be doing it. DayJet was one of the attempts to do exactly that. The Eclipse was designed to support that. Neither was effective at achieving their goals. Seemingly, we are in a “chicken or egg” situation. We need to reduce costs to serve more customers to be able to hire more brilliant people, but we need some brilliant innovation first to achieve those initial cost reductions. Fortunately, I think we already have a number of brilliant people in our industry, more than enough to accomplish this. What we do not have is an industry-wide consensus of how we should attack the problem. Surprisingly, I have an opinion on what we should do. Need for a new paradigm I like Tapscott and William’s new book, “Macrowikinomics.” Did anyone else read their first book, “Wikinomics?” Brilliant work, but I thought perhaps a bit, well, utopian, really. Wikipedia, I thought, flash in the pan. Never last. It’ll be like fark and a number of other would-be sites, or perhaps they will go commercial. Nothing of the sort happened. Wikipedia is still with us, still growing, still almost entirely volunteer. But wikinomics--the idea, not the book--didn’t stop there. In fact, the idea of global collaboration has morphed into crowd-sourcing, which is currently being used in for-profit companies. So, perhaps Tapscott and Williams know what they are talking about. One point from the book struck me and stuck with me. The more I turned it around and around in my head, the more it made sense to me. A stable, supported, free and open platform for development and innovation. An “Aviation Linux”, if you will. Here is the issue. A proprietary standard in software made it very difficult for third party software houses to break into a particular market, and when they did, the holder of the proprietary standard still held all the cards. Anyone recall the whole Microsoft Explorer versus Netscape lawsuit? That’s a classic example of the problems with proprietary standards. Aviation, of course, is rife with proprietary standards. Open source, open architecture basis Linux made a huge difference in the world of software. It broke the proprietary lock on computing platforms, provided not just a solid operating system, but a whole new paradigm for support, licensing, and value creation. Instead of fighting over who got to choke the most money out of the customer, the conversations now center around how to provide value to those same customers. Since the customer doesn’t have to spend mountains of money on a proprietary operating system, money is now available for software that can actually produce value, creating even more money, some portion of which will be fed back into the software industry, creating a virtuous cycle of change. This is huge and worthwhile. With a solid, open base to work from, software houses have been able to provide more innovative solutions faster than ever before. Costs are coming down. In fact, projects that were too expensive to even contemplate under the proprietary system can be done because of the global standards that having an open source basis allows. Imagine an aviation industry with an open source, open architecture basis. Can you get a free airplane? This subject can be huge and messy to deal with. Let’s limit the discussion a bit. There are things that can be done with what I’ll call an open source, open architecture business design, but let’s hold that for another day. Let’s assume that the cost of the airplane, cost to acquire and cost to operate (which includes cost to maintain) is a large and significant portion of our basic cost as providers of business aviation services to our ultimate customers, the passenger, regardless of which segment we personally work. So, what would an open source, open architecture airplane look like? What would the benefits be? Can I get a free airplane? Aviation differs from software in some ways. For example, the product life cycle on a piece of software might be a couple of years. Yes, there are people who still use Windows ME just as there are people who fly classic aircraft, but they are a small part of the market. The aviation product life cycle appears to be around forty years, not two. And aircraft have to be certified, software doesn’t (a pity, that). Moreover, software can be replicated for a marginal cost that approaches zero. We cannot replicate an airplane for anything like zero cost. So, no free airplanes. Sorry. The concept With those limitations understood, or at least acknowledged, let’s nail down the concept of an open source, open architecture airplane. If we can get that far, then perhaps some of the potential advantages will become obvious. I’ve actually given this a fair amount of thought. Feel free to disagree with me, but follow the logic to the end. An open source airplane is one that is designed so that all of the intellectual property is licensed under something terms similar to what one finds in the open source software community, but tailored for aviation. I’m not a lawyer myself; I’ve never even dated one! And there may well be regulatory issues for granting PMA that I don’t understand. But for the sake of this discussion, let’s say those are resolved. All of the design data for the airplane, the drawings, the stress notes, the certification data, everything, really, is freely available to anyone who is interested. The open architecture portion is allowing people to plug in different parts to achieve new functionality, or the same functionality using different technology. For example, I can have different radios that do different things, or I can have a fuselage frame that is fabricated as a sheet metal build up, or machined out of plate, or made as a thin wall net casting, or built out of carbon fiber instead of aluminum. Control the interfaces, and publish required form, fit, and functionality. The point of it all No, this will not result in dozens of crashes due to crappy parts made by who knows whom. Parts have to be certified and the source of the parts, the manufacturer, has to be certified for all of the manufacturing process required, pass a first article inspection, etc. If they can’t do that, they can’t sell parts, just like now. The difference is that anyone, anywhere, who is certified for those processes (or willing to get certified), can make parts. Opening up the potential supplier base is one possible aspect of an open source airplane. It will have to be managed, of course, and that management can be ad hoc, or it can be planned from the beginning. I’m an engineer; as a rule I like to control things from the beginning. Keep in mind another benefit, no license fees, so parts can cost less. An economist might call this a “perfectly competitive” market, or at least an effort to move in that direction. There can be enormous arguments about this part, but honestly, I think the open source, open architecture airplane has to be designed and certified by professionals in the industry. I don’t believe crowd-sourcing works here (I would love to be proven wrong). I think there will have to be an actual “Open Source Airplane” company. Someone has to hold the type certificate. OK, not really—the FAA holds the TC of a lot of aircraft that are no longer in production and the original company is no longer operating. But, I don’t believe anyone can amend the type design data for those airplanes. That is something that is absolutely necessary for the open source, open architecture airplane. The airplane must evolve over time. That’s the whole point of it. A benefit to whom? The thrust (pardon the pun) of an open source airplane is to be a basis for innovation. For example, over the course of time, things change, particularly in avionics. There are a lot of people out there making a very nice living upgrading your avionics for you. And there are a whole lot more people out there who will not upgrade their avionics because of the cost. What if we had an airplane designed from the very beginning to allow rapid, inexpensive upgrading of avionics? What if it were designed, in fact, to be a platform for new services that we haven’t even thought of yet? Perhaps, we can have an airplane that is designed to allow easy upgrades of avionics that require certification, plus additional avionics-type services that don’t require certification (and can thus be easily and rapidly changed), plus other services for the passengers. I’m over my head here. I’m an aerodynamics and structures guy, not an avionics guy, but even I can see the huge money that gets sunk into extremely expensive electronics suites that cannot be easily upgraded. Think proprietary standards here. Think poor design. Cui bono? Open for additional ideas Imagine the possibilities inherent with aircraft avionics that are open architecture powered by open source software. Exactly! Imagine a linux-powered suite of electronics on your airplane. I have no real idea what might happen. Perhaps, my airplane can have a web presence (maybe my engine tech wants to look at some parameters while we are in climb or cruise—click, or use a web cam to check a reported leak in the wheel well--click). Perhaps, we can have a high-bandwidth, net-based ACARS on-board. Or how about an open source TCAS emulator using a hybrid ground/air network? On a more mundane level, maybe my airplane can act as a mobile weather station, continuously reporting useful information about local conditions down to the ground. What about a network-based CVR/DFDR? Or, the passengers, pilots, and ground-based services (or satellite-based services) can be combined in new ways that allow something completely new that we can’t even imagine at this point. If we open up the aircraft electronics, all this and a great deal more become possible. Not only can the hip and cool open source software be useful, but think about the current avionics OEMs. This sort of thing will totally alter how they provide value to the aircraft owner. What makes their radios better than the other guys? Who will be the first to move to an open architecture? Who will enable the utility of third-party plug-in, rack-compatible accessories? No, I have no idea what those third party accessories might be, but I’m sure someone has some ideas. Now, apply this same paradigm to other parts of the airplane: the interior, the engines, the flight controls, the landing gear, etc. The joy of it Remember the marketing pyramid? Bill Gates at the top, everyone else at the base? Innovation is sort of like that. There are a few innovations that are so expensive that they require the resources of a wealthy industrialized nation, or even a consortium of nations. Think space programs, interstate highway systems, and all the different implementations of nuclear death. Other innovations require the resources of large corporations. Think mass produced automobiles, skyscrapers, and aircraft. Some innovations can be created by individuals: like software, clothing, and art. The farther down the innovation pyramid we go, to coin a phrase, the lower the required investment and the more people who can participate. The joy of it that? Not all and not even most of those people have to be from within our industry. It’s a way of bootstrapping the process: co-opting the efforts of people outside of business aviation to benefit us and our customers. Different and powerful An open source, open architecture airplane as a platform for innovation empowers small groups of people - even individuals - to innovate, to collaborate with one another and with the current crop of major players. These innovations can easily spread throughout aviation, including the heavy iron folks like Boeing and Airbus. Are there difficulties to overcome? Certainly! But to control our own destiny, we have to make a move; we have to do something different. This is different. This is powerful. Terry Drinkard is a Contract Structural Engineer based in Jacksonville, Florida whose interests and desire are being involved in cool developments around airplanes and in the aviation industry. He has held senior positions with Boeing and Gulfstream Aerospace and has years of experience at MROs designing structural repairs. Terry’s areas of specialty are aircraft design, development, manufacturing, maintenance, and modification; lean manufacturing; Six-sigma; worker-directed teams; project management; organization development and start-ups. Terry welcomes your comments, questions or feedback. You may contact him via editor@blueskynews.aero Other articles by Terry Drinkard:
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