Airplanes are cool. They look cool, especially the older WWII era planes with their big curves, art work and the way they always look like they just came back from a fight. And of course, they fulfill man’s long-time dream of being able to fly without having to worry so much about falling to the sea like Icarus.
What would make them even cooler? Blockchain. Now, you might be asking how exactly that works. Isn’t blockchain only for cryptocurrency? Nope, blockchain is potentially far more versatile than that with applicability for all sorts of industries. So, what’s the application here?
One of the things blockchain technology is known for is its ability to securely track information, allowing users not only to transfer information but to verify its authenticity. This is already beginning to happen with check-in procedures. Airlines are faced with an incredibly daunting task; they need to keep their customers’ personal data private while also running background checks to ensure they don’t pose a terrorist threat. Blockchain allows the airlines to take that dilemma by the horns and encode fliers’ personal data in such a way that the airline can access it without its being able to be accessed by an outside source or falsified. With blockchain, it should even be possible to tie that information to a code on your passport that lets the TSA person scan it in order to verify you are who you say, while also running a secure check to make sure you have stayed out of trouble since the last time you flew.
Baggage tracking could also be helped. Yes, the airlines already track baggage and generally do an adequate job at it. However, there is still plenty of room for improvement. Tagging your favorite piece of Samsonite with a blockchain code allows it to be kept track of at least as well any current system. However, that data can still be lost or faked unless it’s part of the blockchain. In this system, a number of nodes all around the world actually record all the encoded information and verify themselves against the other nodes. With copies all around the world, this system would be very difficult to break into and alter any of its data.
That same feature, having the data in multiple locations is a big deal for all sorts of aviation data. Even something as simple as location data can benefit from being recorded in multiple nodes. Rather than having it all in one or two servers that can lose data when they crash, they can be in hundreds or thousands of nodes. Even if half of them crash, the other half are still there with a nice clean copy of their data. All of this makes it easier to avoid a situation like the lost Malaysian flight MH370. When that flight went missing, kicking off a massive search and months of news coverage part of the problem was that investigators couldn’t locate the flight data.
This directly relates to all sorts of other data, even data stored in the much-vaunted black boxes. While they might be incredibly tough and can practically survive having a nuke dropped on them it doesn’t matter if the one you need is at the bottom of the ocean. Imagine instead that information is also getting streamed to a secure blockchain network, so if a plane goes down you don’t have to spend resources hunting down that box, you already have all the data.
Naturally, we at TARTLE are big fans of these kinds of moves. Anything that helps make data more secure and more available is right in line with our mission to use data to build a better world.
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