Research areas for DARTeC announced at Farnborough International Airshow

Digital Aviation Research and Technology Centre

Following the creation of the £67 million Digital Aviation Research and Technology Centre (DARTeC), of which Thales is a founding partner, the primary research areas aimed at addressing challenges in digital aviation have been unveiled at this year’s Farnborough International Airshow.

Launching the challenges in a white paper; ‘Addressing the digital aviation challenge’, the partnership behind DARTeC – led by Cranfield University – set out how they will aim to unlock the potential of digital aviation for the UK and global aviation industry. The five primary research areas will be:

  • Connected systems – developing digital systems that will operate at speeds the current aircraft communications addressing and reporting system, and aircraft condition monitoring system are not capable of producing.
  • Unmanned traffic management – developing airspace management solutions that will bring higher levels of system resilience, safety and security while adapting to competition from unmanned aerial vehicles to operate in the same airspace.
  • Seamless passenger experience – developing a more personalised, intuitive and less stressful passenger experience by using digital integrated technology to examine challenges such as unified security, the elimination of triple waiting areas, optimised passenger flows and baggage separation.
  • Distributed airport and airspace management – developing the next generation of air traffic control in an environment of steadily increasing air traffic density and ‘on-demand’ requests.
  • Conscious aircraft – developing technology and systems that would allow aircraft to monitor its current health, allowing it to reliably predict the useful life or components and systems, while automatically adapting to optimise their remaining life.

The research areas boil down to solving the challenge of being able to manage the rapid pace of air travel growth, a key issue for the aviation sector with passenger numbers expected to increase by 49% by 2050. Solutions aside from expanding the capacity of airports and ground infrastructure need to be found.

Steve Murray, VP Strategy & Marketing at Thales in the UK, says:

“Thales is excited to be a key part of this digital centre of excellence for aviation in the UK, where we can come together with ecosystem partners to develop digital solutions for the airlines, airports, aircraft and air traffic management of the future. Thales is uniquely placed with its skills and capabilities to take an enterprise approach across all of these domains.”

Stuart Young, Deputy VP for Research, Technology and Innovation at Thales in the UK, explains more about DARTeC from Thales’s chalet at the Farnborough International Airshow:

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