“When MH370 disappeared [the Malaysian Airlines plane that was reported missing on March 8, 2014], we looked at ourselves and asked, 'How is it possible that something like this could have happened?'” said Tim Ryan, director, Commercial Aviation Solutions for Rockwell Collins.
Rockwell Collins had been in the asset tracking business for two decades, and been actively looking at airplane location technology since Air France flight 447 disappeared over the Atlantic in mid-2009.
The challenge of keeping tabs on aircraft anywhere in the world was complex — multiple and mostly incompatible technologies, and the cost of new tools/downtime expense to install them, whether on the ground or on aircraft — and there was little demand to solve for such an incredibly rare event. (The risk of someone getting hit by lightning is much higher.)
Within weeks of the MH370 event, the industry’s main trade association, the International Air Transport Association (IATA), began hosting closed-door meetings on plane tracking, in which Rockwell Collins participated, “primarily to listen,” according to Ryan. In June, IATA declared its intentions to issue standards for plane tracking by the end of the year.
Rockwell Collins decided it wouldn’t wait.
“Early on, IATA laid out the challenge to use existing technology, and that struck a chord with us,” Ryan explained. “It also added an economic component to the engineering discussion, which meant considering technologies that weren’t very sexy but had legs all of a sudden.”
Like the NASA engineers who famously returned the Apollo 13 astronauts to Earth by innovating using only the materials on board the tiny space capsule, the Rockwell Collins team had to innovate to a concept — use what’s already in the cockpit, and on the plane — instead of designing to a new spec. CEO Kelly Ortberg and the management team said, in so many words, “Do whatever you need to get it done.”
“The company embraced it as an obligation, and you can’t underestimate the value of a moral mandate,” said Yun Chong, vice president.
The small core team of five engineers needed that buy-in, considering the challenge meant modifying many processes, if not sometimes violating them outright.
“A typical project starts with requirements development, then work, design reviews, followed by testing, more work, reviews, and readiness testing,” said Nora Meyer, director of engineering. “We had to execute some of these steps in parallel, which is riskier if one fails.”
In fact, they founded the project not on a requirements doc, but rather a white paper that outlined the technical challenges of format, cost of support, and other issues. The paper would be updated as the project progressed, and ultimately published.
The team then met twice weekly, each member with expertise in different aspects of the company’s communications tools. There were numerous starts and stops, like an initial idea to database the information coming from an airplane (it was too vast, so streaming it was adopted instead). Participants taught themselves code to accomplish tasks with their fellow team members. The environment was “stressful,” according to Meyer.
The result, ARINC MultiLink flight tracking service, was ready for beta testing in six months, and signed its first customer in November 2015, less than a year after the project was launched.
“The cultural impact was huge,” Ryan said. “And there’s an ongoing discussion about standing up some of the key learnings for the organization’s regular processes.”
“We showed ourselves what we can do, and we were surprised by how well we did it.”
