With me to shed light today on the latest developments in cockpit capabilities is Robin Glover-Fauer. Robin flew fast jets for the UK’s Royal Air Force, then spent 20 years as a pilot for British Airways. He is currently chief customer officer at Acron Aviation. He previously served as president of L3 Commercial Training Solutions. My questions and comments are in bold.
Avionics technology is an intrinsic part of aircraft valuation. Generally speaking, what are the key avionics innovations that you expect to transform the commercial cockpit in 2026 and beyond? And how will these innovations affect aircraft appraisal and lease pricing?
Well, John, at Acron Aviation, our mission is to innovate to create safer skies. We’re an avionics technology company. We have been in that business for well over 30 years, producing flight data recorders and surveillance.
I think the future of avionics really is about surveillance and the technology that can be developed in the existing suite of surveillance. Airlines already have a multi-layered safety management system. All airlines do.
However, there are always gaps in information, and gaps in that system itself. One of the prime technology innovations that I think will go forward is ADS-B In. The “Out” already is onboard aircraft.
ADS-B Out is mandated. It’s the ADS-B In that I think is the future and will give pilots much more information and start to close some of those safety gaps that we see in safety management systems.
Robin, as a courtesy to those who might be unfamiliar with the term, please give us a concise definition of ADS-B, which is an acronym for Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast.
I recognize these acronyms can sometimes be confusing to your audience. But the concept is relatively quite simple.
ADS-B uses an existing box on board the aircraft. For some time now, we have broadcast additional information from the aircraft; this is where the language of “Out” comes from. The information goes Out of the aircraft. That information is, for example, the GPS position, the velocity of the aircraft, the heading, direction, altitude, etc. This information is broadcast and relayed by satellites, by ground stations to air traffic control.
Air traffic control systems have primary radar, but they also have secondary information, and that information is broadcast out of the aircraft to enable greater situational awareness. ADS-B In takes that technology and brings it back into the flight deck. What does that mean? That means in addition to sending out your own information as an aircraft in the flight deck, you can receive the information from other aircraft around you.
This allows the pilots to see an update every second, 360 degrees, of the GPS position, the velocity, the heading, the altitude of all those aircraft around you. More information is always good information for pilots. It enables them to increase their situational awareness.
But what we then do in a technology and an innovation space is we then start to develop algorithms. We start to develop the capability of the ADS-B In so they can feed into instruments on board the aircraft or the flight automation system, allowing pilots to start using that information to fly more safely, more accurately, and start to do procedures that hitherto they weren’t able to do because the information wasn’t available.
Regulators have talked for years about the benefits of ADS-B In, but airlines live in the world of downtime checks and budgets. If an ADS-B In mandate does emerge, what do you think the retrofit reality will look like for short haul and long haul fleets? And how disruptive or manageable is this likely to be compared with past surveillance or connectivity upgrades?
Yeah, that’s a great question, John, and we recognize that, of course. The industry is concerned about that.
What I’d say in short, the disruption compared to previous mandates is significantly less. We’ve worked in partnership with American Airlines, who announced just last week that they’re going to install ADS-B In to the whole fleet. And we’ve been working with them now for several years.
Let’s use their experience. The way that American Airlines has updated their fleet is primarily through the A-check. They’ve sequenced it in the A-check, aircraft down three, maybe four days maximum.
The software is predominantly a software update. There is a little bit of hardware. There’s an additional gauge on the Airbus 320 that we’ve installed for American Airlines called the aircraft guidance display.
So a little bit of hardware, but all of that can be installed in the normal sequence of the A-check. We think the disruption is minimal. Yes, it does require planning.
For example, American Airlines has made plans for 302 of their aircraft over the last few years as they’ve updated the whole fleet. So we anticipate that partnership that we have with American Airlines can be replicated with other airlines.
And of course, we’re here to support. We have training material for the pilots, training material for the ground crews, and we support our airline partners every step of the way in terms of implementation.
Aircraft appraisers and lessors are increasingly sensitive to avionics divergence within a fleet. Do you see ADS-B In becoming a value enhancing differentiator for aircraft or a value risk for those that are late or non-compliant? And how quickly could that gap open in real market terms?
Well, I speak as a pilot. I think the sooner this technology is adopted, obviously the benefits become more apparent. I think on that basis, it’s definitely a value enhancing update. Yes, for safety, but also for the capacity that it creates.
For example, American Airlines has found through a trial at the Dallas-Fort Worth airport that they were able to achieve zero infringements of the safety separation limits that aircraft use as they approach airports, but an increase in capacity. That capacity at peak times was as high as five additional arrival slots per hour into, in that case, Dallas-Fort Worth, a busy airport. So we see the early benefits of safety, but also greater capacity being very real and obvious.
It’s also the case that the closer any fleet will get to the mandate, the risks of planning the implementation and ensuring that the equipment is on board in time for the mandate starts to draw to that point you’re raising, which is there are some risks if you leave it late and if you leave it close to the mandate. Our anticipation is that most airlines will want to get ahead of that and plan out the implementation over the period that the regulators are likely to allow.
ADS-B In is often described as a way to unlock airspace capacity through tighter spacing and better trajectory management. From your perspective, where are the most realistic capacity gains and where might expectations run ahead of what airlines and Air Navigation Service Providers, ANSPs, another acronym, can practically deliver in the next decade?
I think the capacity and the enhancement of capacity is a key component of ADS-B In. Pilots become collaborators with our colleagues in air traffic control.
They become reactive to the ADS-B Out, they are reactive to air traffic control’s instructions. In ADS-B In, they are proactive. They can start to anticipate, they can work with air traffic control because they have information.
What does that mean in reality? It means that, for example, the safety separation, whether that’s time or distance, is flown precisely. Not in any way are those limits reduced. In fact, as I said before, we had zero infringement of the limits, but they are flown more accurately.
And because they’re flown more accurately, the flow is increased because there are no wasted miles or wasted seconds. The aircraft is flown by the pilots using the information under the instruction of air traffic control, absolutely precisely down the approach lane, down busy air corridors, between the, for example, the East Coast Corridor, and that saving of time, that precision of flight increases the capacity.
So as the technology is adopted and we train the pilots, there are many ways that ADS-B In can actually increase the capacity of the existing airspace.
As a former RAF pilot and airline executive, how do you assess the real cockpit value of ADS-B In? Does it materially change pilot decision making in busy terminal airspace and oceanic operations? Or is its greatest benefit more subtle than many expect?
I think, again, we should look at experience and there’s a degree of skepticism amongst the pilot community. Whenever you bring in new technology, pilots will always test whether or not it’s going to add or take away. But what we found with American Airlines is that once the pilots had become comfortable with the equipment, followed through on the training, they immediately took to the additional information that ADS-B In gave them.
I guess the best testament would be if we were now to take it away from them, what would they say? In most cases, they say to us, don’t take it away. We really value this information. We can see our situational awareness is much, much higher than it was before.
We can work with air traffic control. We can perceive situations where we can see the speed of the aircraft ahead is not what it should be and then preempt that. So there are lots of ways that a pilot can operate in a safer but also more efficient way. And our experience so far is pilots absolutely take to it extremely well.
Thanks for your time.
Editor’s Note: This article is a condensed transcript. The video conveys the full unabridged interview.
