Part 1: The Problem With "Build It and They'll Come"
Jim Barry
The aviation industry is experiencing one of its most significant periods of technological innovation, with advances in autonomy, artificial intelligence, new propulsion systems, and digital aviation. Yet many promising technologies encounter unexpected obstacles, not because the technology itself falls short, but because of the complexities of certification, integration into the existing aviation ecosystem, stakeholder acceptance, and demonstrating measurable value to customers. In this discussion, we bring together three experienced aviation practitioners to share their perspectives on the critical factors that enable innovative aviation technologies to move successfully from concept to widespread operational adoption.
What is your involvement, or what has been your involvement, in the development of new technologies?
1. What Are You Actually Trying to Achieve
Stephen Creamer
I think everybody here has been involved in the development of new technologies. The real question you always have to ask yourself, and perhaps I didn't earlier in my career but I do it more now, is what am I trying to achieve? New technology for the sake of technology is a fool's errand. It almost always runs into trouble, particularly in the air traffic management system. Starting out with a problem statement and then working through a set of parameters on how the technology can fit the need is a really good method to go forward. The method by which you do that, and then how you collaborate, is the secret sauce. I don't think there's anybody in the world who has figured out how to do it really well, because it's a hard problem to solve. But I do think we're getting better at it.
The ATM community is starting to standardize and coalesce because it has been through this multiple times. However, we are our own worst enemy in thinking that we can do anything without permission and engagement from our regulators.
Nancy Graham
Same for me. Steve taught me a lot of lessons. We were working together as partners, he was my air traffic controller contact when I was director for Oceanic. The first lesson the FAA taught me was that whatever project you're given is not what the job is, just what it's called. The job is delivering an operational benefit, and until you get that operational benefit, the job isn't done. That's very different from the name of the project. What is the operational benefit? What's the utility it's intended to provide? All the pieces that go with that are not obvious at the outset, because of the horizontal nature of aviation.
In the second part of my career, with ICAO, what I learned most was that culture defines the degree to which people will accept the technology. The culture is very different around the world, and the way the FAA does it is not the way others do it. The implementation strategy relative to the actual culture is fundamentally important.
In this part of my career, working for the last 10 years with new entrants, they taught me that no is not the right answer. I knew that intuitively. I did that at the FAA myself. But what I didn't realize was how deep I was going to need to dig to get to yes. It's more about translating the intent of what the regulator means, or thinks they mean, because the regulations don't yet exist, to honor the spirit of what it should be but isn't there yet. That's difficult for new operators to understand, particularly those coming from the technology sector. You go from the least regulated industry to the most regulated industry in one step.
John Illson
I come from an operational background, having flown for over twenty-five years. I've been working a lot in the eVTOL and advanced air mobility space, and my role has primarily been figuring out how you integrate all the new technology into the existing legacy system without disrupting it, and making it safer rather than introducing new risks.
Nancy and Steve both said it well. What's the value? How does the entire system benefit from whatever is being developed? If you don't have a good answer to that, your chances of moving this forward are pretty slim. And the number of stakeholders you have to align to get things moving, I learned this the hard way. If you don't have buy-in from people who are going to be impacted by this new technology, it's not going to move forward. They need to understand what's in it for them, how they're going to benefit, and what risks they need to know about so they can figure out what the value proposition is.
Jim Barry
John, you're begging me to ask, how did you learn the hard way?
John Illson
When I joined ICAO, I had over twenty-five years of operational experience as a commercial pilot but I had very little knowledge about the organization, as well as the breadth and complexity of the air transportation system. That was a real adjustment and I made every mistake I think you could possibly make. Nancy was good enough to mentor me through that transition. Due to the guidance I received from Nancy, Steve, and others, I was able to better understand how the multiple aviation systems interact to ensure safety. It was a very rewarding part of my career.
Stephen Creamer
John is selling himself a little short. One of the things we benefit from, and this is what Nancy was describing about her last 10 years, is when you interact with people who ask you, "Well, why is it that way?" It forces you to rethink, and that's incredibly valuable. We have to find ways of capturing that as we deal with people working on emerging technologies, because they truly want to know. Your first reaction might be to brush it off, but then you realize that's something they genuinely need to understand.
I had a conversation early in my career, when I was in my fifth or sixth year at the FAA, just as I started doing work outside the control room. I went to a symposium and sat next to a retired Boeing 737 program manager. He asked me why we have to be separated by five miles in radar separation. I had a set of rehearsed answers because that's what I'd been trained to say. He said, "Yeah, I don't think that really cuts it." He left me with a lingering doubt I've had ever since. Stay curious. Why do we do it this way?
It ultimately doesn't come down to safety in the abstract, because safety is a somewhat amorphous concept. It comes down to, what is the risk, and how are you solving for the risk? How do you control it? That's ultimately what all these solutions are. Being able to break things down that way helps engineers and emerging groups understand, because it puts things into formulas and processes and steps, while helping the rest of us see how our procedural methods of solving things flow into the same set of gates. It helps everyone merge into how they have the conversation.
Jim Barry
Two things you just said I want to double-click on. First, stay curious, meaning you're probably going to get headwinds in this industry and you have to not be afraid to challenge them. Second, risk and safety. We have safety experts on the line, and there's always this concern from people who've been in the industry that newer entrants, let's say from the technology sector, don't really understand the safety culture here. What advice would you give them?
Stephen Creamer
Just visualize your first accident with a fatality and work your way back from there. How did you get there? If they think about that, they definitely don't want that outcome, because they'll immediately recognize that's bad for their company, their investors, and the people they're trying to serve. They start working their way back from that point, and that's ultimately how the safety culture got built that we enjoy today. New entrants just have to get the accelerated education in understanding it. It's fairly easy to get them there, because everybody works through the practical and financial implications really well.
2. Regulation Equals Process, Not Safety
Nancy Graham
I had some of those early discussions with major technology companies, for sure.
What I've observed is an over-reliance, until people are educated, on the idea that regulation equals safety. That's not true. Regulation equals process, and we hope that process equals safety, but regulation doesn't equal safety.
From that experience, I put in my contract years ago, at the very beginning when I started working with new entrants 10 years ago, that you have to put in a safety management system before I will work with you. It doesn't need to be expensive. It doesn't need to be complicated. It just needs to be the basics. What's your framework? How are you going to stay inside the boundaries of safe operation? How are you going to know when you're in a caution zone, and who's going to make those decisions? That's it. If we keep it that straightforward, so that a CEO or COO can hold that frame, I think it's very helpful. Otherwise it becomes too complicated to act on.
I'll give you a brief example. When I was with the FAA, there was a certification process for the software technicians who fix systems. Both the software and the people had to be certified. I came from DoD, not the FAA, and my question was, what does that actually mean? The answer I kept getting was, it means we've done a lot of testing, it means they went through a lot of steps. But what does certification of the person actually mean? Why was everyone so concerned about that particular word?
The answer, eventually, was that it meant a pay raise. That's it. It didn't mean anything about safety. It meant that because they were certified, they received a somewhat higher salary. That was a revelation, but it made me realize safety is a complex web that none of us fully understand. When you pull one of those threads, you need to understand the connections between all the other things it's tied to. That's really hard to do without a horizontal view of the system, and that's not how we train people. We train pilots, controllers, and flight standards people, but we don't train them to look at the safety picture as a whole.
That is changing, and I'll give John a lot of credit, because safety management is part of what's changing that, not just for the regulators but in how we implement and express that culture today. It's understandable and digestible now, instead of being an impenetrable ball of complexity, the way it felt to me many years ago.
3. Accountability Changes Behavior
John Illson
One of the things I think we did well with safety management was stressing the concept of accountability. Someone I worked with at ICAO used to say that before safety management, there were only two causes of an aviation accident: pilot error and the law of gravity.
We tried to move past that, and we created a regulatory requirement to have an accountable executive. In most cases that should be the CEO, though there are different regulatory approaches that allow some flexibility depending on the type of organization. It made people in the C-suite understand and at least be aware of what their risks are. They became ultimately responsible, accountable, for managing those risks, and that changes behavior.
If you focus only on compliance, and someone fails to comply, sometimes for very good reasons or because aviation is a complex and dynamic environment and they made a mistake on a particular day, thinking you can remove that one individual from the system and fix the underlying problem doesn't work. By moving the concept of accountability higher, not just in the industry but also in the regulatory bodies, I think we made real progress. The FAA is reorganizing now, and they have an Office of Safety Management reporting directly to the Administrator, which I think is a very positive development.
The cultural piece and the accountability piece complement regulatory compliance, because as we used to say when we were flying, you can be totally in compliance and still not be safe. Compliance and safety are not the same thing.
