With Blockchain, the Skies are Limitless

The blockchain industry is notoriously heavy in travel, more so than most other sectors. It’s not just conferences and partners you have to meet around the world, but the base concept of blockchain revolves around it. Decentralization means that your product, your company or your people are spread all over the globe. Which makes it a little ironic that one of the industries most ripe for blockchain is the one that enables all this travelling — the aviation industry.

If you go back 100 years, before the Wright brothers, you would never believe how we travel today. Not only do large metal boxes carrying hundreds of people fly, but they do it thousands and thousands of times per day. It’s truly remarkable how far we’ve come in the aviation industry since the Wright brothers’ first flight.

But in terms of industry innovation, aviation lacks behind almost as badly as financial institutions do. For starters, while there is an international body (IATA) which provides regulation on air travel — the actual airplanes and the parts that make the planes are controlled and regulated by government bodies.

Suppliers are sourced from all over the world. The metal is from country x, the wiring from country y, windows from somewhere else entirely. When something as complicated as an airplane gets made from scratch, it has to source from hundreds of different suppliers around the world. Naturally, this also means that they need to verify, pay, and track the goods from these suppliers. This is perhaps where blockchain can make a big difference.

For example, one idea that has been tossed around in the blockchain aviation industry is that of storing data from barcodes on the ledger. These barcodes can be on any part or component provided by a manufacturer. More importantly though, blockchain would be able to make sure there is a record of every part of the plane including who it was handled by and how much it was paid for, throughout the entire process of constructing an aircraft.

Obviously, this is potentially just one aspect of the aviation industry. The supply chain management and the verification of where the supplies came from are massively important — especially since different countries have different regulations on how products are manufactured. But there are many other aspects of aviation that could use blockchain implementation. Airport/Airplane maintenance, specifically recordkeeping and maintenance histories, for example, and also managing the payment/sales of the infinite vendors at airports.

However, I’m not an expert on aviation — no, my core responsibilities are and always will be with DCore. I’m happy to see what will come next for the aviation industry and their cooperation with blockchain. In fact, there may be something in the works with DCore. Stay tuned!