Public Funding for Satavia Ltd

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The International Air Transport Association (IATA) is estimating that the COVID-19 pandemic will cost the airline industry more than $314 billion, reducing revenues by 48% in 2020, as a result of travel restrictions and their aftermath (IATA COVID‐19 Updated Impact Assessment, 14 April 2020). In April 2020, the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) reported that scheduled flights in the UK were down by 89% and the cost of lost airline revenue in the second half of 2020 may be close to $16 billion. Overall GDP in the UK will be reduced as a result of COVID-19 by 6.5% in 2020, at a cost close to $200 billion. The total impact on European airline revenue will be a 55% reduction in Revenue Passenger Kilometres (both international and domestic) for the full year 2020, at a cost of $89 billion (ICAO document: Effects of Novel Coronavirus (COVID‐19) on Civil Aviation: Economic Impact Analysis, 15 April 2020). The vision of the project is to analyse the progression of the COVID-19 pandemic and predict the recovery of the aviation industry. The project initially involves modelling the progression of the COVID-19 pandemic and then will develop a 'return to service' model for the commercial aircraft fleet, region by region. SATAVIA has supported the Ventilator Challenge UK project (www.ventilatorchallengeuk.com) to provide data analytics on estimated ventilator numbers. The SATAVIA data science team has developed capability to predict ventilator number requirements based on modelling of the progression of the pandemic. Several of the data science team previously have epidemiological backgrounds which enabled us to quickly develop an analytical grade model. We intend to extend SATAVIA's current 'envirotech' software platform to include epidemiological analysis capability. Key objectives will be to: (1) Integrate COVID-19 forecasting methodology with confidence intervals, test using historic data, and validate the predictions; model how the progression of COVID-19 cases correlate with climatic conditions and policy interventions, and the use this to understand options for air travel to resume. The main focus of the enhanced capability will offer a near-real-time analysis of industry recovery as travel restrictions are released to predict commercial flight activity into 2021\. The project is highly innovative as it brings together a diverse and highly capable data science team, and extends SATAVIA's software technology to aggregate a diverse range of data sources spanning epidemiological to atmosphere and climate analysis, for an industry that is a critical part of the global economy. During the course of the project, SATAVIA has developed leads with a number of aircraft operators in commercial and business aviation. The Extension for Impact funding will enable SATAVIA to engage in demonstrations and further development is required to ingest passenger data directly from the organisations. Further work is required to develop a scalable, cloud based solution; to provide an operational data feed; integration into the SATAVIA API; and the development of a SDK (software development kit) for third parties to integrate directly into their solutions.

"This project will develop competitive design capability for ice crystal icing in new and novel engine architectures as well as improved ice detection and anti-ice systems. The improved understanding of icing mechanics in combination with an integrated icing protection system and better characterisation of the icing will ensure that the UK remains competitive on future gas engine architectures such as the UltraFan; an important step in continuing to meet environmental targets. The work packages will be developed by Rolls-Royce working in partnership with the University of Oxford as well as GKN aerospace and SATAVIA Ltd, in addition to utilising the UK manufacturing services supply chain."

Satavia is a SME that provides digital environmental awareness solutions. Aircraft exposure to environmental factors, including ice, dust, sulphur and volcanic ash, accelerates wear of engine and airframe components, and may pose a threat to flight safety. Unscheduled maintenance is costly and causes disruption to airline operator flight schedules. Satavia’s mission is to enable aircraft original equipment manufacturers (OEM) and operators to minimise unscheduled aircraft maintenance caused by the environment. The solution is a patent-pending cloud-based Big Data platform that combines technology from numerical weather prediction, Earth Observation, and live aircraft tracking, to provide environmental factor exposure products for individual aircraft. Environmental exposure analytics will allow OEM maintenance schedules to be proactively adjusted, or operator planned flight trajectories to be optimised against predicted exposure. Satavia is working with Innovate UK to to develop an enabling platform across several technologies in order to demonstrate capability and build lead customer revenue.

At any moment there are 1000s of commercial, freight and military aircraft traveling through the atmosphere. Flight operations are dependent on the availability of information (observations and forecasts) on the location and severity of natural hazards (e.g., icing, turbulence, convection, lightning, volcanic ash, desert dust) that could be detrimental to the safety of flight. In order to tackle such natural hazards which pose risks to the safety of flight, SatAvia Ltd. (UK) is developing an end-to-end solution that links flight planning done at the surface, operational air traffic management and aircraft operation through the real-time provision of best-available observational and forecast information. The DAEDALUS service will be tailored for the aviation industry to deliver expanded awareness of natural hazards using satellite communications and will assimilate Earth Observation and forecast model products and data from aircraft-mounted sensors. SatAvia Ltd. is developing a patent application to cover the DAEDALUS system and service concepts.