Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:09):
What do you see as the biggest technology and connectivity challenges currently facing aviation?

Will King, IDEMIA Travel and Transport (00:16):
I think it's a brilliant question. I'm going to answer it with another question, which is some kind of hypothetical what-ifs. So I think the challenge is we need to transition from today's fixed infrastructure to either semi-permanent or even mobile infrastructure. And the reason for this is what happens if there's a cyber attack, there's a network outage, air traffic control goes down, as I got caught up in the UK recently, there's a major disruption. And now you've got tens of thousands of people where they shouldn't be. You've got baggage mountains forming. And what do we need to do to do that? The easiest thing to do is equip somebody with a mobile phone that can, for example, take a photograph of a bag and it will just say, "Oh, that bag belongs to Will King." We have different technologies that we can use, but they all require a transition from what we have now where you go to a physical place and join a physical queue and fill out a physical tag to the mobile equivalent.

(01:15):
For me, the future use cases that we're looking at, they mandate flexibility and they mandate transition away from the physical cable to non-wired solutions. And let me just give a fine example. I mentioned this concept of a smart lane where people just walk through. This is coming. These are being deployed right now. What it means is a border guard who has spent the last 20 years in a glass booth stamping passports, that's what they've been doing for 20 years, suddenly they're standing in the flow of people holding an iPad, wearing smart glasses, whatever it may be, to identify who they need to intercept, who they need to interview, who they need to talk to. That's a massive change operationally, but from the network perspective, it is an absolutely enormous change.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (02:00):
Weisu, come across to you as well - from the work you do, what would you say is the biggest technology and connectivity challenge?

Weisu Guo, Cranfield University (02:08):
First thing to recognise is that aviation is a multi-stakeholder and high-risk environment. In many ways when we're passengers, we're all in it together. So there's no single entity that decides and every party, every authority is necessary. So what does that really mean for connectivity? We often have to realise that on the air side - that is, the connectivity is across vast distances in time and distance. And there's a very low appetite for risk and a very high requirement for synchronisation. So innovation has certainly got a wide range of hard problems to address, but it's also very hard to penetrate and to replace legacy systems. And part of that challenge is that it's very difficult to calculate the risk-reward trade-off of innovation in these kind of high-risk, complex aviation settings.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (03:05):
Jack, what would you say is the biggest technology or connectivity challenge that we're facing?

Jack Mandala, Seamless Air Alliance (03:12):
Yeah, so even with all of these great new advancements we're seeing, airlines are still faced with the challenge of fear of missing out, I think, in terms of their vendor selection on connectivity on board and interoperability. So when an airline makes a decision finally to go with a service provider, they're taking the aircraft out of service, they're installing proprietary gear on that aircraft, and it's a huge expense. So even if there's no contractual lock-in between the airline and the satellite service provider, there's sort of this inherent lock-in because they've gone off and made a huge investment of time and money. So a big airline might invest a billion dollars across their fleet to equip each aircraft with the modem and antenna that connects to a satellite system. So if that satellite operator decides to make a big increase in costs, or if that satellite operator's performance goes down, it's painful for an airline to walk away.

(04:31):
It's not an easy decision. So this lack of interoperability and this fear of missing out on the next big thing.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (04:41):
Khalil, from an operator's perspective, what would you say the biggest technology and connectivity challenge is here?

Khalil El-Boji, Orange (04:48):
I think from an operator's point of view, we can have four different challenges today. The first is coverage. Operations can happen in different areas - inside or outside the airport, on the ground, or maybe sometimes directly on the flight. It's difficult to have the same level of connectivity everywhere. The second challenge is predictability - for critical applications, best-effort connectivity is not enough. We need to know if the network can support the application at the right place at the right moment. The third challenge is resilience - for important and critical missions, relying on one network is not sufficient. We need to be able to switch between different networks, from private networks, from Wi-Fi, or maybe newer connections like non-terrestrial networks. The last point is interoperability. I think it's the most important because aviation is global and there are lots of operators, lots of countries working differently, and aviation needs something very simple, very easy to use.

(06:08):
And that for me is the last and most important challenge that we have to address with the operators.