Why We’re Here
Prior to the pandemic, growth in aviation was strong. To meet demand, aircraft production was steady and spares inventories were staged all around the world to keep planes flying. New aircraft technicians were being trained as quickly as academies could be scheduled and new airlines were sprouting up around the world every month. Then, the bottom fell out. The science around pandemics will prepare us for managing the next global health crisis, but global air travel will never be the same. It must change to become more efficient, flexible, resilient, and sustainable.
Over the past 16 months, many aircraft have been and are still grounded. Airlines have gone out of business. Seasoned aircraft technicians have taken an “early retirement.” Over the next 16 months, airlines will reconfigure their fleets. Many thousands of aircraft will be decommissioned and parted out, and thousands more will be resold, converted for new purposes, upgraded for efficiency and safety, and for many, returned to lessors. Many aircraft parts providers have and will continue to merge to survive and to create new economies of scale. Business models will continue to evolve towards “flight hour services” provisioning. Many new aircraft technicians will need to be trained. However, the industry can no longer afford to take 25 years to get these technicians the “life experiences” they need to maintain aircraft of ever increasing complexity.
We recall the ancient parable of a blindfolded group of people meeting an elephant for the first time. Everyone could only feel one part of the elephant and described the elephant from their perspective about what they discovered – the leg, the trunk, the ears, the tail, the side. No one, however, could picture or describe the whole of the elephant. In aviation, the companies that support and maintain aircraft are the blindfolded and the elephant is the aircraft. No one entity has the complete picture of the aircraft, its configuration, all of its parts, and their flying condition at any one point of time. There are information gaps.
Information sharing, highly valued by many, has remained an elusive goal in aviation due to pervasive trust barriers that exist between stakeholders. It’s time for everyone that has a stake in the safe and profitable aircraft lifecycle to think about their role in bringing down these barriers. The real question now is how the industry creates the “visibility” needed to build a safer, more efficient, more sustainable, and more resilient future.
In our newly envisioned ecosystem, the plane takes center stage. We need information about, and for, that plane over its entire life. That data must “survive” the legacy information systems used today to build, fly, and maintain those planes. We call this “Data for the Life of the Aircraft”.
SkyThread is the industry blockchain that provides data for friction-free transactions for the aircraft from its birth through to its decommissioning. A plane is a million parts flying in common formation, so SkyThread is also focused on the birth of each aircraft part and follows it throughout its life until it becomes unserviceable. Furthermore, nothing happens without qualified technicians. SkyThread captures the technician training certifications and allows the industry to follow technicians through their careers. Of course, the workplaces for aircraft parts and planes are also regulated. SkyThread registers the “place of work” as a critical blockchain validation that the transaction, as reported, is happening.
We call this triangulation of the 4Ps– Planes, Parts, People, and Places.
SkyThread works with industry stakeholders to define the data, transaction, and process gaps that cause inefficiency, waste, and delay in the full lifecycle management of Planes, Parts, People and Places. The value to unleash with industry engagement includes:
$6B in saved operating costs
$15B in increased airline revenue
$5B in aircraft lifecycle value creation
$14B in inventory value creation
Data sharing is a key principle that drives this value creation. These opportunities exist between business processes, not within them. They exist between information systems and they exist between actors in the ecosystem.