Airbus UpNext: Developing New Technology to Assist Pilots, Part 1 of 2

Airbus UpNext is a European company that develops and tests future technologies in aviation. The company is currently conducting a project called “Optimate,” in which it’s looking for ways to help pilots taxi to and from the airport with greater efficiency and safety. On today’s program, we’ll meet Pierre Bizet, a flight operations and testing engineer for the Optimate Project. He explains why the team is focusing on the taxiing stage of an aircraft’s flight.

“If we look to the future, we’re going to have more and more traffic and more and more planes, so we’re going to have to taxi more and more planes on the ground. This creates a workload for the pilots. It means they have many, many things to observe.”

To improve pilot efficiency and aircraft safety, Optimate engineers are testing several new technologies during the taxiing phase.

“First of all, we want to develop automations. We have a lot of them as soon as we take off. But before that and after landing, we don’t have any automation. So, we want to develop this so that the pilot can let go of the controls and just have to program these automations and supervise them and program them as he thinks is right.

The second axis we want to work on, is precisely this communication between air traffic control and the pilot, to no longer pass through voice and radio, because today we’re a bit saturated, we’re at the limit of what we can do. What we want to do, is to digitalize. It’s a bit like SMS, if you like. This actually allows us to have answering times that are much shorter and then we can talk to everyone at the same time. We don’t have to wait for others to speak. So, these are the functions that we are going to look at. This will reduce the workload for our crews and our two pilots.”

In the Optimate project, the researchers are testing several new, cutting-edge technologies, including “Light Detection And Ranging,” or LiDARs, in which lasers measure the distances between aircraft and other objects. “And we are the first to implement them in aeronautics such as: LiDARs coupled with radar. It is also to make what we call ‘computer reason.’ So, it’s artificial intelligence that will enable us to guide our planes in the future.”