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Advances in aeronautical informatics : technologies towards flight 4.0
Durak U., Becker J., Hartmann S., Voros N., Springer International Publishing, New York, NY, 2018. 156 pp. Type: Book (978-3-319750-57-6)
Date Reviewed: Feb 27 2019

Let me preface this review by saying that as a small-time hobbyist pilot (single engine land), I fly when I may a little general aviation piston airplane; my day job as a computer professional pays for the gasoline. Advances in aeronautical informatics is a work that deserves consideration under an unusual light. This review is different insofar that it entails a bias that may be useful in understanding a greater context; therefore, I am adopting such an approach unapologetically.

I was initially perplexed by what at first sight appears to be an uneven collection of standalone contributions that includes literature reviews, position papers, close-to-the-iron engineering essays, curriculum development, and even more. Unless I missed it, the book also lacks an explicitly declared audience, replacing it with a claim to “close an important gap in the literature.” Lacking a unifying structure, and offering a disconnected experience, I spent an inordinate amount of time thinking, what am I missing here? Perhaps I have an answer.

Looking at the growing list of quagmires besetting the evolution and operation of aviation, one can enumerate the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FFA’s) Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen) refactoring of domestic flights in the US with delays, technical hang-ups, cost overruns, and controversial out-of-pocket mandated costs for swaths of general aviation players; several high-profile accidents involving wrongful interaction of airborne automation and pilot supervisory functions; almost unmanageable complications in the development of new high-tech aircrafts for civil or military purposes; and so on. A further, different complication arises from a dearth of new vocations for commercial pilots, where the cost of entry for a living wage position--except for military pilots--makes its pursuit a labor of love rather than a viable commercial undertaking.

It takes a village to fly a plane. Motion in six unrestricted degrees of freedom, in a busy public airspace, is a systems integration project that is bound to grow in complexity, especially with the introduction of unmanned flight. A traditionally conservative (it works, don’t fix it) approach to the high-risk pursuit of modern flight is not viable. However, the path forward represents a dark technological, regulatory, and cultural forest that is only partially mapped--uncharted territory.

The interdisciplinary mandate of modern flight automation (pilot on board) and flight autonomy (pilot not on board) is becoming a challenge where it is necessary to prevent the complexity of systems integration from becoming intractable. Powerful economic incentives support its solution, but at present the path to success is under careful scrutiny. This book assembles a sample of the trees in this forest, for consumption by the village--the aviation community.

In this regard, the book is largely academic and representative of a somewhat disjointed community of T-shaped technologists, with great expertise (the vertical bar for T) in some specific aspects of the multidisciplinary effort of flying an airplane today, and sufficient peripheral understanding (the horizontal bar) of some of the other parts. An unstated discomfort that appears in its pages is the need to turn the T into a downward-facing black triangle, implying greater cross-disciplinary expertise at least for the denizens of the bleeding-edge aviation village, portentous to trailblazing the path to a workable, practical solution to this budding and difficult challenge.

The book’s contribution is in its words, of course. However, in my opinion, there is an even greater contribution written between the lines, as described above, in the unstated discomfort and unevenness it portrays. Perhaps in a few decades, reading this from the seat of an unmanned air taxi flying from JFK to somewhere in NYC, the problem will appear quaint. At present, it is anything but.

The book consists of prefatory matters (foreword and preface) and three parts, for a total of ten chapters. The first part (“Introduction”) is a grand summary of historical changes in flight technology in one chapter. The second part on information technology (IT) for flight, six chapters, broadly discusses hardware, software, networking, and data management for avionics and ground-based infrastructure. The third part (“The Challenges”), in three chapters, is a forward-looking analysis of some of the sharp curves on the road to success. Each chapter is a deep dive into a specific subject, composed in different styles and with different formats, and could be read as a standalone paper. There is a vast body of citations. The work as a whole is, at the cost of much additional reading, a graduate-level introduction to the subject.

Reviewer:  A. Squassabia Review #: CR146450 (1905-0164)
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