The view from 50,000 feet: aviation’s biggest challenges

October 2024

The global aviation sector is at a pivotal moment. Just as the world is facing enormous challenges — climate change, workforce demographic shifts, geopolitical instability, disruptive technological advances and more — so is our industry. Success for the future will require diverse, future-facing strategic systems thinking that connects stakeholders and challenges across the ecosystem we are all part of. It also requires articulating how we can help solve, rather than make worse, those global challenges. The panel I moderated in July at the AIAA Aviation Forum, “The View From 50,000 Feet,” teased out some of the issues. Here is a compressed version of our two-hour discussion. (Watch the full discussion here.) — Russell Boyce, AIAA Aeronautics Domain Lead

Russell Boyce: Thank you everybody, welcome to the panel. Together, we’re going to tease out the following scenario: Many of you will remember “The Jetsons.” What we’re going to address in the next hour and a half or so is “‘The Jetsons’ meets the 21st century.” Bob, for that scenario, what pieces of technology do we need to bring it about?

Bob Whittington, Amazon Prime Air: At Amazon, we’ve developed a very good computer vision system to help the drone make sure it stays safe as it operates in a crowded environment. Let’s say you don’t want to come into somebody’s backyard with a package when somebody’s there. You have to train your system to know what a person looks like or what animals look like. You wind up taking thousands or tens of thousands of photographs, and you have thousands of hours of labor to label all those photographs to teach the system what a person is, or what a dog is, what an airplane is, what another unpiloted vehicle looks like. So, if we’re going to personal transportation, the disruptor is going to be doing the automation in a way that doesn’t require all those labor hours. So, large language models, the LLMs, are not there yet. We need to figure out how to train our systems in a way that’s economical, and then apply that to take pilots out of the airplanes. That takes a lot of computing power and a lot of technology that we don’t have yet.

Nick Lappos, Lockheed Martin: Today, Federal Express transports 20.5 million packages each day in the week before Christmas. I don’t think those packages “see” each other, but Federal Express knows where each is within a few meters during the entire journey. If you think about the air traffic system in the future, it could be like a drone show today. I’ve seen 3,000 drones make beautiful pictures of ducks and cats, and they never bump into each other because they’re networked together. We have to change the whole concept of the air traffic system away from detect and avoid.

Keoki Jackson, MITRE Corp.: The question is, “How do we get there from where we are today?” We also need to consider the application of automation or new framing of networks. The CrowdStrike update in July that shut down a lot of the aviation sector was one example. Take, also, the NOTAM system going down in January 2023. This somewhat ancillary system essentially shut down big chunks of the airspace for a couple of days. You also have to think about the infrastructure. Take the 2021 Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack that essentially shut down a lot of the fuel, including aviation fuel, to the East Coast. Then, think about some of the network effects and systems like ADS-B that are reliant on GPS. How do we think about re-architecting and redesigning these systems so there’s redundancy, but they can also re-heal in case of disruption?

Whittington: Nick, I appreciate your vision and where you want to be. If I wait for you to go implement that vision, I’ll be out of business. So, we need a system that integrates within our current system. I’m planning on delivering 500 million packages per year by 2029.

Lappos: I absolutely agree that if you disrupt the system for a future that might or might not be, you end up with chaos. However, if every air vehicle has detect and avoid built in, the economic threshold increases. If you had a network system, the network connection and instructions might be 5% of the cost, and therefore your vehicles get smaller, cheaper and easier to use —

Whittington: Agreed.

Lappos: No one wants to stop what you are describing. On the other hand, if you were to design the future system based on the limitations of today, you’ll end up with those limitations carried through for the next 200 years. We have to be careful that the transportation systems for the future are designed for the capabilities of the future.

Oscar Garcia, InterFlight Global Corp.: My concern is that technology development is outpacing the policy and regulations frameworks. So AIAA as a standards-developed organization has a lot of solutions for that.

Boyce: Michael, what are the key pieces of science needed for this future world, this future scenario?

Michael Winter, RTX: If we think about the vehicles that we fly today, you’re carrying several orders of magnitude in energy storage when you leave the ground. As a society, we are really not good at storing energy. We’ve been relying on these hydrocarbons, which provide 44-45 megajoules per kilogram. That’s why we’re starting to see for space, as an example, the reintroduction of nuclear to go longer distances. I’ll also mention hydrogen storage. Hydrogen at approximately 120 megajoules per kilogram is three times the energy density of jet fuel, but it’s four times the volume, so you need to store it as a cryogenic liquid. There’s some interesting work that was done about three decades ago that looked at capillary condensation, essentially using carbon nanotubes to condense hydrogen to a liquid state at room temperature. It was demonstrated in the laboratory, and nobody was able to repeat it until about 10 years ago, and that too was not routinely repeatable. So there’s some science there in terms of the properties of hydrogen that we really don’t understand.

Linda Cadwell Stancin, Lockheed Martin: Mike, how do you see nuclear fission playing in the future for commercial transportation?

Winter: Any new technology that we introduce will be as safe or safer than anything flying previously. The basis of safety for commercial certification is one part in 10 to the ninth — one in a billion. Is that going to be tolerable in fissionable materials that could end up on somebody’s property or in an urban setting? I believe that will likely remain a challenge.

Vivek Lall, General Atomics Global Corp.: In space, there are new developments in nuclear thermal propulsion as well as nuclear electric propulsion, and I do feel fission power on the surface of the moon and reactors for that, those lines will blur eventually into aviation.

Boyce: Nick, what are the gaps in certifying, regulating and managing a future transportation system?

Lappos: We must find a societal answer to the questions about emissions. Society may decide that fossil fuels work very well in some areas, and as long as it only represents, say, 5% or 10% of the total emissions of the society, it may be acceptable. I think we have to govern ourselves with that in mind, because gasoline is five times the energy density of dynamite. It’s going to be hard to break that habit unless we recognize ways to get around it. The No. 1 barrier is that many of the innovative companies that are trying their hands at air vehicles today have no idea what the FAA certification system is like. In our final report, the AIAA Certification Task Force noted that AIAA could serve as an information-clearing house. So people in Silicon Valley can deal with some of us who have been in this tough world for a long time to help shape their submittals and get them much more likely to be certified quickly. The other barrier is how FAA has not considered the business requirements of the future advanced air mobility machines. The current rules would exclude probably about one-third of the urban environments. We think the idea of the future advanced air system would be allowing time variable airspace denial. So when a 747 is on the ILS, nobody goes near them. But when they’re not using the ILS, then the package express flits around and delivers packages in otherwise forbidden airspace.

Boyce: Instead of the FAA perspective, what about the venture capitalist’s perspective?

Garcia: FAA’s role in certification is to administer — not to disrupt, not to promote, not to create. So it’s up to us as an industry to bring to FAA not only the technology we want, but the means of compliance of that technology going forward. It’s up to us in industry to create the consensus, voluntary industry standards that we deliver to FAA as a means of compliance for the technologies, whether it’s automation, whether it’s propulsion. We have to shift the paradigm to where we do not wait for FAA to give us the solution to scaling and commercializing technology. And that is where AIAA can shine, in terms of the consensus standards, capabilities. The billions of dollars we need to enable technologies like high-speed flight or advanced air mobility will not come until we show decision-makers that we have not only technology solutions but compliance-ready solutions.

Winter: I’ll expand on that. Today, the certification chapters for the electrical system onboard an aircraft and for the propulsion system are separately defined. We and others are actively working on demonstrator programs for a regional turboprop, which is a 50/50 hybrid, and we’re working in partnership with Airbus and others on a single-aisle that is a mild hybrid of about 5%. There are no certification chapters for when the propulsion system is reliant and interdependent on an 800-volt bus. So the key is back to what Oscar said: Show the alternate means of compliance.

Boyce: A question from the audience: What should we be doing to make transportation — air and multimodal — more resilient to climate change?

Lappos: The idea that the emissions of the vehicles are an important measure of the vehicle’s performance is absolutely essential. And I must also say this: We always balance the future vehicle, like the battery-powered air vehicle, against today’s machine, but today’s machine is not tithed with the expense of the effluent that it throws into the atmosphere. We buy a gallon of fuel and we spend a given amount for it, and then we burn it, and no one looks back and says, “You just caused this much damage, and that has to be recovered.” It’s my belief that one of the ways that society will end up creating a proper economic balance for the future is to create the expense for the fuel’s damage at the pump.

Jackson: Also, just think about the impacts of extreme heat events. We’ve seen cases where certain aircraft types have been grounded in certain regions because they’re outside of their operating regime. Now, there are technological solutions to all that, but we should anticipate that these kinds of challenges will become even more prevalent over time.

Lall: There are a lot of gains from sustainable aviation fuel or electric or hydrogen. Oftentimes, you do get cleaner energy at a particular point design, but you have to look at the lifecycle — whether it’s batteries or other things — to assess the total impact to the environment.

Boyce: Oscar, what’s the No. 1 issue that developers of the technology and the airspace management systems should be firmly fixed on to achieve viability?

Garcia: The capital decision-makers look at technology evolution through the readiness levels. Look at market demand, and when those two start meeting each other, immediately look at three vectors. First, policy. Is this going to be scalable? Can it proliferate into the societal market evolution? Next, the regulator. Who is going to administer and take responsibility for the certification of that technology? Finally, can the technology evolve?. If you look at those in terms of sustainability, safety and service to the community, there are oftentimes misalignment. So, a top priority would be to wrap those regulation vectors around the super vector that I call the voluntary consensus standards— the norms of behavior, best practices vector. That gives investors and capital decision-makers the assurance that the policy, regulation and the technology could be aligned to scale up for market use and return on investment.

Lappos: On the technical vector, AIAA serves as a very good clearing house for technology, because unlike the applicants who come to you with their very best pig in a polka dot dress, AIAA is a group of technicians and scientists who can comment in a way that does not have political or monetary implications. The only organization I see that does that as well is NASA.

Whittington: For certification, we have to talk about safety. In piloted aviation with passengers on board, we talk about one in a billion as our design criteria. When somebody dies, there’s a much greater reaction than, for instance, the 50,000 people in the U.S. who die every year driving cars. Part of our certification challenge in the AAM world is there are no agreed-to standards. That means every time there’s an accident, there’s a potential to over rotate and shut down the entire industry because we haven’t agreed on what safety means. There’s increasing pressure to have zero be the only OK answer, and everybody who’s been in this industry knows you can’t get to zero unless you just park them.

Boyce: Is there an ethics conversation that’s needed?

Whittington: There is that conversation, but nobody in a political environment can stand to have the conversation. It’d be great if AIAA could sort of take that on, or MITRE’s in a pretty good position.

Lappos: Absolutely agree. One of the problems is that the AAM world of the future will have an order of magnitude more vehicles than today. If you hold today’s practical standards — about 10 to the seventh for today’s air transport system — and then you put 100,000 vehicles flying in the United States, you end up having a reportable headline in every city every day. It probably will bring the system to a halt unless there’s some understanding of the reality of the numbers, and I have no answers.

Boyce: Linda, what is the opportunity for enhancing national and international security and stability?

Cadwell Stancin: There’s a definite intersection between security for commercial travel and security for defense. I’ll also raise an equality aspect. On security, it’s quite critical for aircraft to be able to make decisions in real time. You can imagine the data processing, the amount of sensors, artificial intelligence, live agents applied to that. That’s important in a defense setting, but I also believe that’s going to be important in a commercial aspect. So how do we balance the two? I feel as a mom that we have to move so much faster toward security and sustainability. I worry about a volume of commercial flight that’s two, three, four times greater without addressing sustainability. We are working very rapidly in computational fluid dynamics. For example, with NASA’s Quesst, the X-59, we filled in the science blanks of supersonic flight, and then we started working speed, multifidelity physics, modeling, scaling the fidelity of our analysis in gridding, moving analysis from weeks to do analysis to hours. That allows us to iterate very quickly. In the area of sustainability, we now have additive manufacturing. Computational materials engineering has advanced dramatically from ab initio calculations to molecular reactions all the way to full scale, so we can design in the properties we absolutely need and dramatically reduce production waste. We also should be putting a lot more muscle into bioengineering. We can use biomaterials in our production support almost immediately and then move on to incorporating them into interiors, for example. And why do I equate that to equality? If we don’t address these things as we plan our work, it’s just going to be the super rich that get to fly supersonic or be space tourists. We have to build in design for cost up front.

Boyce: Vivek, what must the incumbents of today do to ensure they don’t face their Kodak moment and become obsolete in the future?

Vivek Lall: We live in a world that’s a globalized community. No one country has a lock on the best ideas, and no one country has a lock on the implementation of those ideas. If you’re going to stay ahead of the game, not only do you need to have leapfrog technologies, but you need to do them at the right cost point. The other aspect is that the maintenance, repair and overhaul of products is the long tail where much of the investment goes. So understanding how that piece fits into the product or offering is very important. At a technology level, these days, AI is the buzz word. Well, we all knew AI existed 40 years ago, but what’s new today is the implementation. It’s now possible due to fast processors, the sim technologies. So timing all this into the future is going to be very critical.

Winter: Anytime you have changes in a market, it’s an opportunity to displace the incumbents. I’ll use the example of sustainability. How many countries can make a nuclear weapon? Somewhere between 19 and 21. How many can make a modern jet engine? Two and a half, maybe three. So that’s a technology that is likely to undergo change in the next decade or two. Two of the companies that can make that modern jet engine are based in the United States, and they contribute positively to the largest category in the balance of trade for the U.S. Other countries understand this, and they want what we enjoy. We all need to work together collaboratively through appropriate means to further those technologies and to invest through public-private partnerships.

Lappos: The reason so few countries can develop a practical jet engine is that it takes you about 30 years to develop the thermodynamicists and materials engineers. That’s no longer true as we get better digitization of our systems. I’ll offer an example: The prize for building a man-powered helicopter that could fly at 10 feet for 1 minute and maintain control was not won by any of the U.S. teams comprised of aerospace engineers. It was won by a Canadian group with no rotorcraft design experience. They actually looked up the code and bought some commercial software for the rotors. If we’re not careful, the idea that there are large barriers to entry for people in major complex fields will no longer be true. There’ll be a democratization of the design of these systems, which, in the end, will help humanity overall.

Boyce: Keoki, what would need to be the standout attribute of our future workforce?

Jackson: I’m going to take it as a given that we already have people in this room who love our technology, our science, research and development, engineering. I think the attributes we need beyond that lie in three particular areas. One is adaptability. At MITRE today, we’re shifting toward hiring folks who can adapt to what the needs of a different mission, risk environment or challenge will be — Renaissance people that can bring the combination of great technical depth but also are curious, who have breadth, who are interested in the connections. We’re hiring people that can connect ideas, and that is critically important. All the challenges you heard about today, they’re not just technical connections. They’re policy and environmental considerations. The third attribute is a growth mindset — the idea that we’re not living in a fixed world, but a world of abundance and the opportunity to do almost an infinite variety of things. What kind of leaders do we need? Maybe the simple answer is leaders that can enable those folks that I just talked about. I would also say, “What do people care about as they’re coming into the workforce?” Meaningful work, and that, interestingly, has to do with the colleagues and the co-workers that they’re with. Why do people leave? They don’t find opportunities for advancement, to continue to grow both professionally and in their personal experience. So the challenge is focusing on organizational health. I’ll just end with this description of leadership from Max De Pree, who worked for the Herman Miller furniture company. What does that have to do with aerospace? I would argue that the integration of human-centered design and technology insertion that verges on art is what we do every day. He said, “The measure of leadership is not the quality of the head but the tone of the body.”

Lall: That was outstanding, Keoki. I think ethics and integrity are going to be so important going into the future. It’s important today; it was important in our history. But into the future, as we look at these future aviation, transportation systems, certifications, et cetera, one leadership attribute — and leadership at every level, whether you’re talking technical or managerial — will be ethics and integrity, and that attribute cannot be foot stomped enough.

Cadwell Stancin: I’m concerned about diversity. If you look at the universities and aero degrees, we’re still very, very, very low with women and people of color. I’m wondering if we can do something different, both in the universities and AIAA, where we start looking at multidisciplinary education. We talked this whole time about computing, software, propulsion, even about bioengineering. We should be hiring and we should be growing skills, and we should be cross-training degrees with multidisciplinary degrees enabled across all the engineering and science disciplines in order to meet this mission.

Lappos: To expand on Linda’s point: I think if you were to look at the system that we have today that produces engineers, that starts with young women and young men who have a proclivity for math, science and the love of materials and things, and then we end up producing a graduate engineer. The space between those two milestones could not be less efficient if we tried. Also, to take a young man or young woman and move them to a city a thousand miles away and expend four years of their lives to become an engineer, I bet 80% of the expense and the bother is not in engineering, because our system is designed around Oxford University in the year 1550. What are we doing today with regard to Zoom and other things to help democratize education? I can only tell you the failure our society is that there are young women in Iowa who know how to repair a tractor, and they’ll never think of going to engineering school. They don’t have the money because our society cleaves itself with regard to economics. So those on the lower side of the economic scale may have no idea of how to get to college and then just turn it off.

Boyce: Here is the highest-voted question from the audience related to workforce: When you look to the future of aviation, what other industries would it benefit us to work with or learn from?

Garcia: Today, only about 20% of the 8 billion people on Earth have set foot in an airplane. When 90% have flown on an airplane, we’ll have to quadruple, quintuple, our fleet. The automobile industry knows how to scale up. I’d keep an eye on that.

Lall: The universities are a very important tool that we have to interact with a lot more, not just domestically but in the international domain. Although a lot is being done, I think a lot more investment needs to go into the universities and R&D collaborations with industry.

Jackson: I’ll throw a maybe nonobvious one out there. If we’re really going to seize the seeds of disruption here and disrupt ourselves, it does require a very different mindset, whether in industry or in government. We’ve got some folks who have lived in the venture capital world here, with you would invest in things where maybe one in 10 is going to work out. Those are the kinds of things that we’re going to need to do if we’re going to tackle these challenges, whether it’s sustainable fuels or getting safety incidents down by orders of magnitude.

Boyce: I want to give each panelist each 30 seconds for final thoughts. We’ll start from Oscar and work our way back to Keoki.

Garcia: This event that blends aviation with space for the first time gives us an opportunity to cross-pollinate, to tackle some of the most challenging issues that we’ve discussed. So think about seamlessly blending the aviation and space frameworks and constructs. I think we can get a lot of low hanging fruit there.

Lall: We started with “The Jetsons,” but we need to think about what is “The Jetsons” of today? Very critical will be the diversity piece that Linda talked about, because that’s a building block, and the other is international collaborations.

Winter: Disruption can be uncomfortable or it could provide phenomenal opportunity, and it’s up to us and everybody here at this conference to be the leaders of the future and realize our bright future.

Whittington: I think the aerospace industry is monochromatic. Generally speaking, we came from the same backgrounds, we look the same, we talk the same. That sets us up for disruption, because it keeps you from thinking outside the box. The up-and-coming companies that have huge pocketbooks and no sense of history are happy to go spend a lot of money to go leapfrog and bypass some of the history. So we really need to do a better job of creating a more diverse atmosphere.

Lappos: Right now, AIAA is organized in terms of technical challenges and technical leaps, but maybe it’s not technology that we’re talking about, but people. There’s the question of how we harness ourselves to move forward, the idea that there is a whole capability to raise a crop of people that can help us in the future. How do we do that? And maybe AIAA can be organized to do that.

Cadwell Stancin: Ethics. We face opportunities, huge, enormous opportunities, and we face huge risks in a very challenging climate. I want all of us in our companies, our universities to build in and strengthen ethics in engineering and scientific design. When you think about what’s going on with artificial intelligence and pulling open-source software, it becomes absolutely imperative to really examine ethics in the products that we build.

Jackson: We’re in the business, I would say, of making the miraculous mundane. I want to fly on that that hypersonic aircraft, and if we’re going to make that happen, we are going to have to work collaboratively in spite of some of our instincts, and we’re going to have to think from the outset in terms of resilience and robustness and safety. Those are the things that are going to allow us to accelerate that future that we’ve all been talking about today. So thank you to Russell, thank you to this entire panel. It really has been marvelous.