Go Live

Going forward with Go Live!

Find the best of the innovative solutions the industry has to offer in bite size presentations at the Go Live! Theater during MRO Europe 2021 in Amsterdam

The Go Live! Theater successfully returned to MRO Europe this year with a roster of not to be missed expert speakers. This year the messages were connectedness, supply chains, sustainability, synthetic fuels and blockchain finally coming of age. While Covid is an economically significant but relatively temporary impact lasting a few years, climate change is here for the very long term and becoming a carbon-neutral

Go Live! was well attended throughout MRO Europe 2021

industry will be aviation’s contribution to staving off the worst mother nature can throw at humanity. For this reason, sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) is a dropin fuel solution that does not require the entirely new infrastructure required for hydrogen or hybrid electric. That was one part of the message about SAF from Pratt & Whitney (P&W) fellow of sustainable propulsion, Sean Bradshaw. “We will work with key stakeholders to make SAF is there

in the future,” he said. He described how P&W’s Geared Turbofan (GTF) engine could extract additional efficiencies. “We are working on advanced game-changing technologies to reduce CO2 [carbon dioxide] emissions and other emissions even further,” he added. The industry is expecting airlines to use SAF in blends with jet fuel to reduce, over time, the CO2 emissions. The blend of jet fuel to SAF can be as low as 10 per cent and ultimately up to 100 per cent SAF. “We’ll be ready for the next step of SAF when blends approach 10 per cent. We’ve been testing our engines on SAF for over 15 years on various blends from zero to 100 per cent across our wide array of product families. Our engines will be compatible at blends of 50 per cent and eventually up to 100 per cent.” The standards organization ASTM began work on a new industry standard of 100 per cent SAF blend process and that standard is likely to take up to five years to become reality, according to Bradshaw. From a sustainability perspective, SAF is still small volume with significantly less than one per cent of global fuel demand. President Joseph Biden’s SAF challenge aims to have production of three billion gallons of SAF by 2030, but this is only 10 per cent of preCovid airline jet fuel consumption.

Sustainability was at the heart of the Go Live presentation by Dubai Aerospace Enterprise engineering arm, Joramco, chief executive officer, Fraser Currie. “Sustainability is what an MRO needs, if you can’t sustain quality, you can’t sustain your customers. You need to understand your risks. Transformation, sustainability it works, but you have to work hard at it,” he told the audience. “The key is planning, organization, strong leadership, communication and being very honest with yourself.” An MRO such as Joramco is like a large factory and while the leased aircraft returns kept Joramco staff employed the

levels of work during the pandemic were not what the company had previously enjoyed. “We are now seeing recovery in the market,” he explained. “What kept us strong through Covid was our capacity and ability from 737 classics to 787 and A321NEOs; that is what kept us strong. We could cover what our customers needed.” Connecting with customers and suppliers is key, but what does connectedness really mean? Buffalo, New York-based AireXpert chief executive officer Andy Hakes said: “We rarely hear the word connected, and it really matters. Being linked to 1,800 people on LinkedIn doesn’t really mean anything. It’s about making sure everyone is on the same page all the time.” In Hakes’ view, connectedness is people actively collaborating together with the same goals. What enables control is the integration that delivers the data and analytics’ insights that deliver efficiency. When a business does not have “visibility about what is going on around its networks and systems, we have problems working out the root cause of the problems,” Hakes added. Connections is at the heart of blockchain, a digital ledger that is distributed making its data resilient and automatically updated to all parties involved. SITA business innovation senior product manager, Pierre-Yves Benain, promoted the benefits of blockchain for end-to-end automation, traceability, and transparency to the Go Live! audience. “We are innovating new solutions for the industry” he said. He pointed out that aviation has $50 billion in global parts inventory and 60 per cent of the cost of that is for engines and components. The human error costs related to the management of that vast inventory are not insignificant. Benain explained that SITA was invited by a group of aviation companies to investigate the application of blockchain to solve a range of challenging industry problems. The criteria for success included, end to end process automation with complete visibility, data confidentiality, compliance with industry standards, independent auto-reconciliation and asset value protection for the end user. Benain said: “We believe we are the only ones to make it right [blockchain for aviation].” The key to unlocking blockchain, Benain explained, was that the supply chain needs to adopt it. n

Expertise was on display at the Go Live! Theater

“Sustainability is what an MRO needs, if you can’t sustain quality, you can’t sustain your customers. You need to understand your risks. Transformation, sustainability it works, but you have to work hard at it”

Pratt & Whitney Fellow Sean Bradshaw spoke