TECH TALK
Comparing Innovation Aviation and Aerospace
to Other Industries PART 1: AERO VERSUS AUTO
T
his two-part article series will explore and compare how innovation in the aerospace/aviation industries compares to the automotive market (Part 1) and the electronics/software industries (Part 2). Originally
envisioned as a single article, the vastness of information identified in our research clearly dictated two parts neces- sary to cover the subjects properly. The intent of this article series is to identify several emerging technologies in disparate industries that crossover or influence aerospace products.
AUTOMOTIVE INDUSTRY HAS STEPPED UP ITS GAME The automotive market has surpassed aviation in terms of new advances in recent years in many ways. A recent report from The Boston Consulting Group (BCG), a global management consulting firm, found that nearly half of the world’s top 20 “Most Innovative Companies” are automakers. Even more surprisingly, for the first time this year’s top 20 list included more automobile manufacturers than technology companies, with Airbus and Boeing only ranked 33rd and 34th respectively. GE was ranked twelfth on the strength of its overall product line. (View the interactive chart for yourself at https://www.
bcgperspectives.com/most_innovative_companies.) Fourteen automakers are included in BCG’s top 50
innovative companies, compared to four years ago when only eight were included. This result is amazing considering how advanced the aerospace market is in general, and how quickly new advances in communications, manufacturing and electronics are making their way onto aircraft. A major part of the BCG survey content came from querying international executives, so there might be some built-in bias regarding certain industries. That said, let’s look at how automotive innovations as of late stack up against aviation.
A QUICK LOOK AT RECENT INNOVATIONS IN THE AUTOMOTIVE WORLD
In the past few decades, ideas from aerospace typically and eventually found their way into cars and trucks. Examples are the use of aircraft anti-skid system algorithms being licensed for use in automotive, which
01.02 2015
30 By John Pawlicki
resulted in today’s anti-lock braking systems (ABS), and various types of reduced-weight materials and metal alloys that made their way from aircraft and rockets into ground vehicles. Other examples include drive-by- wire or steer-by-wire, fuel cells, lithium ion batteries, protective coatings and electronics control systems, just to name a few. In decades past, many of the automotive companies purchased aerospace firms to get access to cutting-edge technology and diversify away from the cyclical automotive market (usually with disastrous results, since aerospace is just as cyclical). It has been well-documented how U.S. Department of Defense military projects launched many of today’s commercially successful products (like microwave ovens, GPS, semiconductors and drones) and still continue to do so. There has been more action on the automotive front, especially when one considers how vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) are eerily similar to NextGen and its associated technologies. We will discuss this in more detail later. There are many parallels to key advances in autos when
compared to earlier aerospace work. Now more research and development dollars are spent for ground transportation rather than in aerospace as the chart (from a recent Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers report) reveals:
The Center for Automotive Research reports that
approximately three to five percent of all patents granted in the U.S. are awarded to the auto industry, which translates to roughly 5,000 new patents annually. It can be argued that due to the large number of autos, trucks and motorbikes in comparison to aircraft that this spending gap is appropriate, but perhaps this is misleading. In 2013, the number of
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