SIMPLE Airlines

Bear Systems is building on its next generation cybersecurity platform to provide a range of SIMPLE (Secure Integrated ML Platform Leveraging Endpoints) solutions for the world’s most pressing needs.  This blog entry is one of a series of introductions showing how Bear can provide a SIMPLE solution for specific vertical challenges.

Airlines are all about operational efficiency as fuel costs a lot and getting the most out of each airplane is essential.  To this end, airplanes are being equipped with more and more sensors and flight control systems are growing exponentially more complex.  The goal is to eliminate unwanted downtimes, reduce planned maintenance windows, and obtain the best possible flight paths possible.

While these goals are admirable, the reality is far different and not close to what airlines require.  All of those sensors are really just adding noise as they all work in their own language, each set requires a new management console, and none make understanding the plane any easier.

Flight control systems want to move more and more to automation and yet these systems still struggle with plane to plane interactions.  Very often, pilots have to make manual adjustments as these systems cannot react swiftly enough to handle novel situations.

Compounding these challenges is the reality that flight control systems used to rely on isolation for security and that is no longer viable.  Do you remember when nobody could have a device on during a flight, or even today when devices have to be turned off during takeoff and landing?  These are last gasp efforts to retain some semblance of protection and it is just not working.

Bear’s SIMPLE Air solution overcomes all of these problems by starting with these flight control systems and locking them down.  SIMPLE Air can lock every component on each airplane down and ensure that only the correct data goes to each piece of hardware.  SIMPLE Air goes even further as localized machine learning continuously looks for and overcomes any threat before those threats cause issues.

This same local intelligence also unifies all of those disparate sensors into a single cohesive visual interface that enhances plane visualizations to make problems readily apparent to operators.  SIMPLE Air also encapsulates airline expertise into reusable visual tools that can automate common issues.  As one example, SIMPLE Air can automatically switch from a primary to a backup component in real time with no operational impact and then notify maintenance at the next airfield for a zero-downtime maintenance solution.

Maintenance in SIMPLE Air is also streamlined as the maintenance crew will already know what equipment issues before the plane arrives.  Inspection can occur through automated processes and provide visual reports for these crews to drastically reduce downtime.  Finally, since figuring out potential issues on planes is expensive, SIMPLE Air is building a new type of virtualized simulations that will leverage AI to leverage those encapsulated airline expertise components to continually test and protect systems before potential defects become actual problems.

There is obviously more, much more, to our SIMPLE Airlines solution and, if you are interested, please contact us to learn more!