Aircraft e-enablement advances beyond ARINC 853 at Hamburg Expo

Lothar Trunk, program manager for innovation at Diehl Aerospace (a joint venture between Diehl Aviation and Thales), stated: “One thing we found out is that there is no single gold use case. It’s the overall, it’s working together with data for various applications: that is where the benefits are coming.”

A key aspect of their work involves platform-independent and supplier-agnostic solutions. The goal is for Bühler Motor actuators to communicate with systems like Thales Onboard Data Center or Boeing's on-aircraft system seamlessly.

Despite reductions in per-megabyte data pricing due to new communication networks, the volume of raw data generated by aircraft remains too large for full inflight downloading/uploading. Trunk noted that “what comes from the aircraft is the status, and we’re talking not of megabytes but of a few bytes.” This necessitates on-aircraft processing and on-ground data transfers through cellular connections, gate Wi-Fi, or physical removal methods.

Trunk elaborated: “When you see the seat application recording currently...that’s quite a decent amount of data. It doesn’t make sense to have this data transferred via satellite.” Pre-processing exception data—where parameters fall outside normal operating ranges—is also being explored.

This capability allows maintenance engineers to request additional information about specific seats inflight upon receiving notifications. This can facilitate earlier problem diagnosis and potentially enable inflight resolution recommendations for crew members.

Trunk emphasized that “big data...will still transfer on-ground,” depending on how long an aircraft remains grounded.

Overall collaboration among various entities within the cabin ecosystem was highlighted as essential for progress beyond existing standards. Trunk concluded: “Even [as] competitors, we need this minimum to make this movement in the industry.”

Related Articles:

- Diehl and Thales work to unlock full potential of cabin data

- IATA partners with Aviation Sustainability Forum to tackle cabin waste

- Thales takes IFE innovation to edge with edge-caching and cloud

- Collins makes Cabin IoT play with connected galley field trials

- Covarians seeks to improve cabin environment through actionable data

Featured image credited to John Walton

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