Drone-based maintenance checks on the cards for Cathay Pacific as airline chases greater digitisation
Airline also working on smart reusable luggage tags and a tool to help travellers manage their jetlag, among other measures to ease passengers’ pain
Drones that can check an aircraft for faults, smart luggage tags that can be used over and over, and a tool to help travellers manage their jetlag are among the latest ideas being bandied about and tested by Cathay Pacific.
The airline established an innovation centre in 2013 to develop new technology for staff and passengers. It has since come up with smartphone apps for use in handling air cargo, and electronic flight folders that crew members can use on portable tablets.
Its defect-detection project was developed in collaboration with ground crew to measure and take pictures of problems with the aircraft to help engineers. At present, the programme uses tablets, but it is now testing out mounting these on drones.
“We’ve got our engineers field-testing the tablets now. Once we know that the tablets and the technology works, in parallel we are building out the algorithms for the drone,” said Bidyut Dumra, manager of the Innovation Centre.
Cathay is not alone in developing maintenance technology using drones. In 2014, budget airline easyJet announced plans to use drones to inspect aircraft for damage after lightning strikes.
In June, easyJet said it had successfully tested the drone inspection process and it was able to reduce the inspection time from a full day to a few hours, adding that it planned to use the drones across Europe in 2016.