Blockchain Lessons Learned

By Chuck Marx, SkyThread Chief Strategy Officer

Note: this post is part of a 52-week series Chuck is posting about digital aviation. This post is Week 2.

Last week I launched my "52 week" blog on what we call "Data for the Life of the Aircraft". In the comments to my post last week, I included some history on how we got here. Where is "here"? An industry that despite its customer service successes, is reeling in old systems, disparate data, huge inefficiencies, high levels of inventory and many penalties for missed performance.

Many industry leaders have touted blockchain over the past 5 years as a collaborative solution to bring together this disparate data, add a level of trust, transparency, and validation to this data, and increase the level of cooperation and collaboration between the organizations that are all working towards the same goal - keeping an aircraft airworthy, which includes the collective status of critical parts on the engines and all subsystems of the aircraft.

Over the past months, there have been articles critical of blockchain. That's to be understood with anything new. There have been few alternatives that can achieve the mission and scale across the entire ecosystem.  

But it’s not about blockchain. It’s about Digital Aviation and building ecosystems.

I've been at SkyThread for two years. SkyThread for Parts is launched, and we're happy to report that we've seen validation of the vision, mission, strategy, goals and now the technology layer with an airframer, airlines, MRO (hangar and components, Tier 1 parts, rotable pools, brokers, and related technology firms.

Blockchain Lessons Learned

  • High cost of “run and maintain” – we’re engaged with Blockchain design firms to leverage architecture lessons learned

  • Centralized Data – we’ll only capture the relevant data for life history, not the transactional data that is proprietary and commercial

  • Neutrality of solution – Industry focused solutions must be neutral – many company-branded solutions are stalled.

  • Data Governance not solved – we’ll be using the formation of IDCA to leverage concerns that exist “across” the industry rather than within one stakeholder group

  • Monetization of data sharing – no other blockchain is building customer wallet to share revenue earned (30%) with data contributors

  • Validation of data – next generation solutions must be more than data sharing – they must triangulate data across the ecosystem 

  • Building chains for single company use is not efficient, nor for bi-lateral engagement, which is how transactions are conducted today. Trilateral engagement through collaboration engines creates the most value.

  • SkyThread embraces and create opportunities to “roll-up” stalled deployments of the concepts through business partner relationships – the Chain of Chains.

  • Blockchain outlives the underlying ERP systems that contain this key data. SAP became entrenched in the industry 25 years ago, and we’re looking at SAP HANA reimplementation – where will the data go?  Same for the MRO systems – Sceptre in the US is 40 years old.

 You can reach us at info@skythread.aero