The future of aviation and how innovation will play its part
The aviation and aerospace industries have experienced their fair share of both good times and crises over the last seventy-five years or so. After the second World War the arrival and deployment of the jet engine -and subsequent supersonic flight – revolutionised air travel and brought with it an era of unprecedented growth. A (sonic) boom period during which the skies inexorably filled with commercial, passenger and military aircraft, bringing the world closer together and changing the way in which we communicated and traded forever.
However as someone once said good times don’t last and every once in a while fate, poor engineering or human error intervened to remind us all of the dangers of humans taking to the heavens. Between 1945 – 1970 there were in excess of 250 air crashes, most involving small, light or military aircraft (large scale commercial passenger flights didn’t really come to the fore until the 1970s when cheaper air travel first became viable). In 1974, the first air disaster involving over 200 lost souls occurred when a Turkish Airlines plane went down, and as of April 2020 there have been 33 such incidences, including the 1977 Tenerife disaster when two jumbo 747s collided, JAL Flight 123 (1985) in which 520 souls perished.
Despite these rather morbid numbers, the aviation and aerospace sectors generally have a very strong safety record. The problem is when something goes wrong on an aircraft the world tends to hear about it in a way other forms of travel – in the main – avoid.
More recently of course the industry has faced perhaps its most difficult challenge; the world suddenly being grounded due to the pandemic. The skies turned quiet in a way not witnessed for generations, and observers were asking the obvious question – will the industry be able to recover from this?
Initial views have been pessimistic – over the course of the first twelve months of the pandemic (March 2020 – 2021) passenger flight numbers dropped by an average of over 68%*.At its peak this was as high as 80% and due to border closures even freight statistics have been incredibly low by normal standards.
Nevertheless, there are green shoots of recovery and an interesting quirk of fate that demonstrates the future may not be as depressing as it seems. An aviation research body, Cirium, produced a recent report that outlines short-and-medium-term good news for the industry. By the end of 2021 it forecast only a 30% drop in global capacity vs 2019, indicating that the second half of last year saw a big upturn in flight numbers and passenger use.
Furthermore it predicts by the end of 2022 we will see international passenger traffic back to about 66% of pre pandemic levels (and domestic numbers back to their 2019 level). The good news doesn’t stop there either. Curiously the last eighteen months have seen the creation of no less than 132 new airlines, which is remarkable given the state of the sector. On closer inspection it does however seem to make sense, as the cost of start-ups drastically reduced as a result of the market hitting rock bottom. Confident that at some point the sector would recover, investors have locked into new opportunities, meaning that the industry should (new pandemics notwithstanding) recover in relatively rude health over the next couple of years.
And with new aviation players in the market comes new opportunities for the supply chain. One of the most exciting new developments has been in the area of specialist protective coatings. An Innovate UK funded project by the name of ICELIP (brand name: Icemart®) are developing a novel passive ice-repellent coating that will prevent ice formation and adhesion without the need for active ice-management. As part of this project the consortium behind Icemart® are developing a bespoke Ice Wind Tunnel (IWT) model which delivers increased testing, higher efficiency & less down time. The approach allows for parallel or side by side testing, has a quick release system for leading edges and/or back plates, adapts the angle of attack and can be controlled from outside the tunnel itself. It is modular in design and is therefore not reliant on large structural elements that traditionally take time to move and replace.
While not revolutionary, the Icemart® IWT approach represents ‘new thinking’ which will be the bedrock of aviation development in the coming years. Whether new light weight materials for airframes, AI & digital systems through to coating technologies such as Icemart® disrupting traditional approaches to aerospace development can only act to improve efficiency the environment and critically, air safety! For more information on the Icemart® project visit www.ice-mart.com.
*IATA report, Nov 21