Will blockchain change the aerospace industry?

LONDON, United Kingdom - The complexity of modern aircraft can be staggering. A typical single-aisle commercial jet is made up of several hundred thousand parts while a superjumbo can contain one million or more. With 40,000 commercial aircraft projected to enter service over the next 20 years, the total number of components is poised to rise into the tens of billions. And when you take into account all the different ways those planes can be configured, complexity increases exponentially, write Scott Thompson and Rachel Parker Sealy for PCW.com.

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The Intelligent Aerospace take:

April 23, 2019-Blockchain technology is being implemented in myriad ways in the aerospace industry, including flight recorders, airspace managment, and cyber security, but what blockchain does exceedingly well is keep track of things. By design, blockchain keeps track of time and changes made to the previous block - it's how cryptocurrencies change hands with some sense of surity. Thompson and Parker Sealy note that the technology would track the provenance of hundreds of thousands of parts on a commercial airliner as well as the instances the parts are inspected or serviced.

"(Blockchain) has the ability to seamlessly record its configuration for every flight of its 30-year operating life," wrote Parker Sealy and Thompson.

Related: Red Cat releases beta version of blockchain-based 'black box' flight recorder for UAS

Related: Boeing and SparkCognition to launch joint venture SkyGrid to build AI- and blockchain-powered airspace management software platform

Related: Blockchain and cloud technologies reinforce cybersecurity, boost safety in commercial aviation

Jamie Whitney, Associate Editor
Intelligent Aerospace

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