GE Digital helps make the skies safer with Microsoft development tools

Digital transformation at 36,000 feet

GE Digital is a global leader in airline manufacturing, avionics, electrical power, and mechanical systems for aircraft. The company harnesses large streams of data to provide real operational value, helping the aviation industry improve utilization, reliability, and revenue. By merging industrial brawn and analytical brain, GE helps solve its customers’ toughest challenges.

Empowering pilots with data

Pilots make hundreds of decisions every time they fly—decisions that affect safety, fuel efficiency, and sustainability. But without data on the impact of those decisions, pilots can’t apply any learnings. “Pilots are operating based on their own experience. They’re not operating based on the collective wealth of experience from across the airline,” explains Luke Bowman, Senior Product Manager at GE Digital. “Armed with this data, pilots can make more informed decisions and find ways to refine their performance.”

Collecting data isn’t a problem. Thousands of sensors throughout modern aircraft constantly measure variables such as temperature, vibration, speed, and fuel efficiency. The challenge is making the data—and the valuable insights buried in the data—available to pilots. Qantas came to GE Digital with a challenge: put this data into the hands of the airline’s more than 3,000 pilots, in a format the pilots could actually use.

Leveraging an excellent partnership

While GE Digital continued development of the FlightPulse app, it counted on Microsoft as a trusted partner. Its reasoning was twofold. “One is just the technology itself, and the benefits that come along with it. The second is the reach and relationship Microsoft has within the airline community,” says Scott Ridge, Head of Partners and Alliances at GE Digital .

Adds Richard Pineo, Software Developer at GE Digital, “The partnership that we get out of the Microsoft team is amazing. I’d be surprised if we got that level of partnership from someone else. It’s been great working with them.”

GE built the back-end APIs for FlightPulse using ASP.NET Core and used Blazor to build its Config Console App, used by flight safety and efficiency departments to configure and aggregate the data pilots see. “We were able to build the app faster and work more efficiently given the componentization that we were able to use out of the box with Blazor,” says Ken Kozman, Principal Architect at GE. “It worked a lot more seamlessly than some of the stuff we’d done previously in Angular.” Using Blazor, GE can share code between the front end and back end. “We just build our object model as we would like and as long as we’re using the same JSON serialization technology under the covers, or it’s permissive enough, it just works and that’s been fantastic,” says Ken Kozman.

The team used Microsoft Azure Pipelines to automate key parts of the development process, embedding security requirements within the pipeline so they would run at every build. The result was a smooth, efficient development process that allowed GE to build and deploy a complex solution in months instead of years.

. FlightPulse solution architecture; for a larger version of the diagram, go to the Downloads section of the left-hand sidebar

Pilots get a birds-eye view of their performance

With FlightPulse, pilots have access to pre-flight and post-flight analytics to help them make better decisions around safety, sustainability, and efficiency. Pilots know how they compare to their peers, and they can apply those insights to real-life maneuvers such as idle reverse thrust, reduced flap landing, and engine-out taxi-in. They see their own performance in detail and understand how small changes can increase safety, boost fuel efficiency, and reduce their carbon footprint.

It’s working. In fact, Qantas pilots have increased their performance of fuel efficiency techniques by up to 15 percent. And for every kilogram of fuel saved, Qantas also avoids 3 kilograms of carbon emissions.

Safer flights, cleaner skies

The relationship between Microsoft and GE Digital continues to blossom. Team members will soon migrate their post-flight module into Azure to further streamline the user experience for pilots, and they plan to add more features to the app. Backed by a strong partnership and seamless tools for quick development, GE Digital will continue to build cutting-edge solutions for the aviation industry.

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