Marc Serafino
Air France is not “immune” to modern technologies; it too wants to keep up with what the latest trends and improve its operations. To that end, it is looking for ways to apply blockchain to track workflows within its aircraft maintenance systems.
According to Aviation Today, the company has recently discussed the possibility in a webinar alongside Microsoft and Ramco Aviation, a company that develops software for maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) systems for airlines.
During the session, innovation director for Air France KLM’s business unit James Kornberg said that he’s particularly interested in supply chain applications. “The four features of blockchain are resilience, traceability, integrity and disintermediation [and] are well suited to the aviation supply chain,” he said.
Implementation will not be that easy…
Kornberg, however, added that a major obstacle to blockchain adoption is that much of airline data isn’t actually kept digitally.
“In the aviation industry, we still have a lot of our data that is not digitalized, still a lot of analog data, the first step, and that’s what we’re doing at the moment — going to a fully digital solution, on all the supply chain and all the aviation data that we get,” he explained.
So, until paper-based processes are modernized, blockchain wouldn’t be as helpful as envisioned.
Microsoft could help
As you may have caught, that webinar also included a representative from Microsoft, which on its end has started to invest heavily in blockchain-based technologies.
The Redmond-based giant has recently launched the Coco Framework, an open-source system that enables high-scale, confidential blockchain networks that meet all key enterprise requirements — providing a means to accelerate production enterprise adoption of blockchain technology.
Designed specifically for confidential consortiums — where nodes and actors are explicitly declared and controlled — Coco provides enterprises with an alternative approach to ledger construction, giving them the scalability, distributed governance and enhanced confidentiality.
This could be exactly what Air France, and other airlines for that matter, need. In fact, Microsoft has already begun exploring Coco’s potential across different industries, supply chain being one of them.
Whether Air France will opt to work with Microsoft is another matter… We will be on the lookout for such news and let you know as soon we as hear something on that front. Stay tuned in the meantime.
