SITA: blockchain “potentially game-changing” in the air industry

Yesterday the Lead Architect at SITA’s Advanced Technology Office, Barry McLaughlin, claimed that the implication of blockchain “could be profound for air transport”. SITA, the tech firm owned by the airline industry, believes that the technology has yet more potential to create value.

A Sandbox for Aviation

Last year, SITA launched its Aviation Blockchain Sandbox, a platform encouraging collaboration between airlines to find distributed ledger technology (DLT) applications. A year before that, the organization published a whitepaper introducing FlightChain, its research on blockchain conducted with British Airways, and airports including Heathrow, Miami, and Geneva. FlightChain was implemented on both Ethereum and Hyperledger Fabric enterprise platforms to compare the two. The research project is now hosted on SITA’s Sandbox and recently welcomed “a group of major Chinese airlines and airports”. The critical finding back in 2017 was that smart contracts for data sharing held the most potential for aviation. This conclusion permeates today, as McLaughlin believes “the one thing that makes blockchain relevant to the air transport industry is its potential to securely share information […] without relinquishing control or compromising the security of the data.”

A Big Data Problem

Blockchain’s transparent and immutable nature could be put to use in the vast swathes of data which are produced by airlines every day. A single flight needs booking, payment, pricing systems, departure control, and other parties before it takes place. On the aircraft side, there is crew, fuel, manufacturing, security, and maintenance to consider.

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