20 years ago flying was still the preserve of middle classes and was used sparingly due to the prohibitive cost of air travel. Since then, the rise of airlines like SouthWest and Ryanair have made flying one of the cheapest ways to travel. But despite the fact it is one of the safest ways to travel, flying still has the potential for catastrophic failure because the lives of many are dependent on a small crew of pilots. This is especially pronounced for private aviation.
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This makes the issue of flight safety a pressing one for regulators and consumers alike. Pilots hold the fates of their passengers in their hands, and such a high pressure job warrants the highest possible standards.
Licensing only goes part of the way, since piloting is very reliant on experience and expert judgements. This skill in many ways only develops based on a variety of situations a pilot handles. A pilot who has flown 1000 hours of routine and automated flights may not be as adept as a military pilot who has flown only 150 hours in a variety of pressured and intense situations.
Considering this, it will be surprising for many to hear that pilot logbooks, especially during the initial training and certification stage of the pilot’s career, may be fraudulently or erroneously filled. Furthermore, it is relatively hard to make this kind of information available among stakeholders and validated. It should be obvious to anyone interested in Blockchain technology that the transparency and integrity of distributed ledger technology can bring a lot to the table in terms of pilot oversight. This is exactly what Aeron are hoping to achieve with their blockchain platform that holds pilots’ flying records.
Problems with transparency
The Aeron team, which includes several licensed pilots, gave an explanation of what they see as the shortcomings of conventional paper based pilot’s logbooks:
“We looked at several common problems. The key problems are that pilots may lack experience they claim, as flight log records can be easily forged. Flight schools may be corrupt and help pilots put in hours on paper. Aircraft operators also contribute to the problem by often underreporting the flight hours, saving huge maintenance costs for the aircraft. With quickly developing technology, aside from human factors, we also face database intrusion or loss of paper records, resulting in modification or distortion of data.”
The Aeron team have designed an app system that can be used by flight school employees, customers, and of course the pilots themselves, to make the interaction of people and data smoother and more transparent. Pilots can log their flights on the Aeron blockchain platform, flight schools and other stakeholders can log issues like aircraft related incidents to be linked with the pilot’s profile, and all this data can be confidentially but accessibly stored on an immutable blockchain.
An important solution deployed by Aeron for a simple problem
Since the crowdsale of the Aeron (ARN) token the team have been steadily ticking off their roadmap development goals, as well as being listed on the Binance and HitBTC cryptocurrency exchanges. Their iOS and Android apps have launched to the app stores, and the team are preparing to ramp up their profile with announcements this month.
