How is AI Changing the Aviation Industry?
As the Head of Data Analysis and Interaction at Airbus, Tomas Sanchez Lopez manages the Data Analysis and Interaction team, located within the Operational Intelligence department and the Data Driven Technologies Innovation Centre, at Airbus Group Innovations.
Therefore, he’ll naturally be very familiar with how the company is currently using and plans to adopt artificial intelligence in the future. We spoke to Mr. Sanchez Lopez, who’ll be a keynote speaker at the AI Summit in London (May 9th and 10th), with the overall goal to understand more about how Airbus is deploying AI in its business strategy and how they intent to do so moving forward.
Airbus is a global leader in aeronautics, space and related services, therefore we were interested in learning how they are currently using AI. “Airbus is a large organisation with over 135K employees and circa €65 billion annual revenue, operating at 180 locations worldwide,” began Sanchez Lopez.
“We are interested in applying Data Science techniques to gain insight from data, focusing on Machine Learning and Visualisation, and targeting particular use cases within the organisation,” he explained.
Sanchez Lopez went on to detail precisely how Airbus is currently using AI. “We are working with our colleagues at Airbus commercial aircraft to analyse data coming from various factories, looking at predicting when variations in the manufacturing processes occur, so assembly problems can be tackled earlier, when is easier and less costly, or even prevented completely.”
Yet, they are also using this new technology in other areas. “Another very different example is what we are doing with Open Source Big Data, where we are using social media and other online data to understand passenger experience,” he highlighted. “Insight into what our end users feel and think about travelling, not just during their time in the aircraft but also throughout the overall journey, could prove valuable to develop and market our products, as well as assisting our airline customer in positioning their services.”
The conversation swiftly moved on to which industries does Sanchez Lopez believe Airbus is gaining most traction from in relation to AI. “Airbus is obviously an aerospace company,” he started, “but we have many more products than most people realise.” Airbus’ Head of Data Analysis and Interaction detailed how AI is used to boost the aeronautics sector. “Airbus commercial aircraft is of course the largest and most well know business unit, and AI can help in many different ways; from the optimisation of manufacturing processes (as part of Industrial IoT, Digital Thread and Digital Twin initiatives), to smart maintenance, flight operations optimisation, training or even virtual assistants for pilots and crew.”
Sanchez Lopez even spoke of how AI is applied to their helicopters and even Airbus’ aerospace and defence sectors. “Similar ideas can of course be applied to Airbus’ helicopter division. Airbus Defence and Space, however, brings other opportunities to the table, such as greater automation of border surveillance operations or the monitoring of human welfare through biosensors, such as astronauts or officers,” he stated.
Furthermore, Airbus is additionally gaining traction from AI in the autonomous cars sector. “Something else that is clearly gaining traction is the use of autonomous vehicles, and this is by no means exclusive to the aerospace sector. Urban mobility initiatives such as Vahana or Pop Up have been publicised recently, but AI can clearly help in the further automation of existing products such as Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) platforms.”
The conversation subsequently moved onto which areas of business does Sanchez Lopez see AI having the biggest effect.
