SITA launches Blockchain airline research

SITA Lab, the research team of the air transport industry’s IT provider SITA, has revealed findings from research it carried out with British Airways, Heathrow, Geneva Airport and Miami International Airport into ‘smart contracts’ residing on a blockchain.

While several use cases of blockchain have been identified for the air transport industry, the opportunity of using ‘smart contracts’ for the shared control of data by airlines and airports is one which promises real benefits.

SITA Lab has issued FlightChain, a paper outlining the findings of its research conducted with its airline and airport partners. The research paper details key lessons learned regarding governance, smart contracts, system security and system performance, scalability and reliability.

FlightChain was established as a private permissioned blockchain (implemented on both Ethereum and Hyperledger-Fabric) that stores flight information on the blockchain, using a smart contract to arbitrate potentially conflicting data.

British Airways, Geneva Airport, Heathrow and Miami International Airport provide flight data that is merged and stored on the blockchain. During this project, more than two million flight changes were processed by the smart contract and stored on FlightChain.

Blockchain offers the potential to share data in a controlled way. SITA recognises, however, that there is a need for research so the industry can take the right approach, to ensure high levels of governance, standards, compliance, security and more.

Called FlightChain, it was devised to investigate a single source of truth for flight data.  The “flight data problem” is a well-known issue in the industry – namely, there is no single source of the truth and the data that does exist, is not easily accessed by all parties.

While there are many cases of airlines and airports collaborating to share flight data, this data still resides in separate silos. When there are flight delays, this results in differences between passenger apps, airport FIDS, airline agents. FlightChain ensures all stakeholders have the same information.

SITA CTO Jim Peters said, “Our FlightChain project has demonstrated that blockchain is a viable technology to provide a single source of truth for data for airlines and airports, specifically for real-time flight information. While there are other technologies available for sharing data, the use of blockchain, and smart contracts in particular, provides ‘shared control’ and improves the trustworthiness of the data. This research with our partners shows the potential of blockchain for sharing data across the air transport industry.

“In a real-world network, it will be important to manage the changes to the smart contract as it affects all participants. Industry bodies such as ACI and IATA, working with SITA as the neutral IT provider to the air transport community, could be involved in the establishment of the contract. In fact, we can imagine a future where industry standards are written directly as smart contracts instead of published as PDF documents.”

Glenn Morgan, head of digital business transformation at International Airlines Group, said, “Now we’ve proven the technology, we are really excited by the opportunities that blockchain can create in the industry. We will work with IATA and ACI to ensure the best practices are in place.”

Earlier this year, SITA Labs began testing mixed reality for the aviation industry.