Honeywell Aerospace is touting the benefits of its new “Anthem” flight deck system, an “always-on” cloud connectivity platform that it claims will improve flight efficiency, operations, safety and comfort. But whether connecting the cockpit of a bizjet or Urban Air Mobility vehicle to the internet 24/7 provides sufficient benefit to outweigh its risk is a daunting question.
The cabins of modern business jets already connect to the internet via the cloud on a routine basis. But with their relatively newfound ability to interact with the cloud/internet for extended windows, bringing busy VIPs live-streaming or videoconference calls, has come the recognition that such convenience comes with vulnerability.
In fact the International Civil Aviation Organization designated 2020/2021 as the “Year of Security Culture,” calling for a cybersecurity action plan for all sectors of aviation (including business and air transport) in response to the many cyber threats.
These have arisen in a post-pandemic environment in which highly placed or high net-worth individuals are spending more time aboard corporate/private business aircraft to bypass the risks and individual liberty-inhibiting hassles of commercial air travel.
Combining the connectivity-enhanced properties of aircraft cabins with the more highly prized information of the individuals and enterprises which travel in them sets the motivational table for data breaches and other cyber malfeasance.
With Anthem, it could be argued that Honeywell is inadvertently setting another place at the table for unauthorized access to flight deck information, despite its best intentions.
Making Pilots Lives’ Easier All The Time
Vipul Gupta, vice president and general manager of avionics for Honeywell, is keen to stress that Anthem is the first comprehensive cloud-connected cockpit system on the market.
“There are lots of [aircraft] systems which can connect to the cloud,” he says. “What we’re trying to drive differently with Anthem is being always connected, not just when you’re on the ramp … It’s always connected and architected in a way to provide that capability in the future.”
The near to mid-term future is key for Honeywell, eager to regain market share from Garmin International, which has come to dominate the general aviation — and increasingly business aviation — avionics markets in the past couple decades. Those old enough to remember when a Bendix/King avionics panel was the gold standard (Bendix/King is now a Honeywell brand) will understand the primacy to which the company would like to return.
Anthem’s always-connected quality and user friendliness theoretically pave a way for that return. Even when an aircraft so-equipped sits on a patch of tarmac, powered down, cold and dark, Honeywell’s Integrated Network Server Unit (INSU) is running on battery power, keeping the cloud connection active.
The INSU connects the Anthem flight deck to internet via WiFi or 4G LTE cellular connections on the ground. In the air it connects through high-speed Ka/Ku band satellite links.
In so doing, Anthem doesn’t just bring internet into the forward display stack Gupta says. It provides unprecedented ease of access to information, including third-party applications, to the flight crew at any point in a mission.
“When we say we have an ‘always on’ cloud connected avionics or flight deck suite, it ultimately has a purpose of reducing pilot workload. It will make pilot’s lives easier and everyone associated with that flight, maintenance technicians, operations directors,” Gupta affirms.
Anthem’s touch-and-swipe interface plays its part in easing information access. Though he admits he loves “buttons and knobs,” Gupta explains that Honeywell told Anthem developers they could use only the company’s flat panel displays when designing the control interfaces for the system. The resulting smartphone-like UI can speed pilot tasks and minimize interruption in-flight, Gupta says.
Gupta relates an example wherein a bizjet flight from Phoenix to London has just reached cruise altitude. The pilot is making some flight plan changes via the instrument panel or a tablet in response to weather variations when air traffic control interrupts that task to warn of traffic with instructions to contact another Traffic Center on a different frequency.
“The amount of time which the pilot devotes, from an interruption perspective, is quite high,” Gupta maintains.
With Anthem, a pilot could simply type in a new frequency on the “smart scratch pad” window and then the system will prompt for selection into the correct field (COM1/COM2) while remaining in the flight planning page.
“You don’t have to go back to the radio tuning page, you don’t have to get out of the flight panning page.” Gupta says. “You just put information into the smart scratch pad and the system will prompt you. Once you put it in the system automatically takes you back to the page you were in.”
If this feature saves time and work in-flight, as Honeywell maintains, the savings are marginal. When it’s pointed out that such a cross-ocean flight would have a pilot and co-pilot, the latter of which typically copies radio traffic and adjusts comms, Gupta acknowledges the small advantage such a feature would yield.
For single-pilot operations it might be different. But autonomy is likely the main point. The company’s press release notes that Anthem “supports growing levels of aircraft autonomy, leading to complete autonomous capabilities in the future as regulations allow.”
Future neutral pilot reviews should tell us if Anthem truly reduces workload or if its value-add is mostly marketing. Whether obviating the need for pilots entirely makes things easier is a conundrum those reviewers may want to take up as well.
In the shorter term, the benefits of its cockpit connectivity may best be seen in terms of remote flight planning, according to Honeywell.
Any Time, Every Time
Remote flight plan loading is a headline Anthem capability. Vipul Gupta asserts that it’s a precedent-setting feature. “The ability to [remotely plan/load] any time, whenever you want, is not there today.”
Indeed, the example Gupta gives would be precedent setting.
“There is very deep integration with electronic flight bag applications, the capability to complete a flight plan and then upload that flight plan from the hotel room to straight into the airplane.”
Honeywell asserts that this remote flight planning/uploading can “dramatically reduce pilots’ preflight preparation time by up to 45 minutes per flight.”
However when one considers that the vast majority of business aviation flight plans are known “canned” routes, the “up to 45 minutes” claim looks spurious. Gupta concedes the point as well as the fact that spur-of-the-moment flight plans are routinely crafted, sent and approved in 15 minutes or so.
Nevertheless, loading a flight plan while riding the WiFi from the Hilton or Embassy Suites certainly would be a step from transferring critical data like maintenance status and flight plans via wired connections or drives at the airplane. One noted cybersecurity expert we ran it past on background said it would also be a tremendous cyber risk.
That risk appears more pervasive than ever. Earlier this month, the heavily defended Reserve Bank of Australia characterized the possibility of a potentially destabilizing attack on Australia’s financial system as “inevitable.” The layered cybersecurity of Volkswagen AG was breached along with three other multinational firms in the same month this summer. Forbes recently reported that the cybercriminal group SnapMC is breaching corporate systems and issuing extortion threats in 30 minutes or less.
Honeywell seems undaunted by the possibility that Anthem could be a conduit to data theft, monitoring or aircraft disruption.
“You can always say, ‘no connectivity on the airplane.’ That’s an easy answer for anyone making a [digital] flight deck today,” Gupta asserts. “We’ve chosen to have full connectivity with the flight deck with the full realization that cybersecurity is the number one concern for us.”
As such, the company has created an internal organization which supports cyber security 24/7, Gupta says. Anthem has been designed with “zero-trust” architecture baked in, Honeywell adds, aligning with NIST’s 800-207 cyber standard. It also “carries the spirit” of this standard within the Anthem gateway for internal communication.
The gateway “provides hardware partitioning between avionics and communications.” It’s a logical, vital safeguard but one clouded by Gupta’s revelation that the third party applications which Anthem can host aren’t limited to weather, radar, maintenance or catering apps.
Honeywell is also working with airframers and their partners to provide “OEM Autonomy” as a capability. Anthem can host aircraft system management apps — flaps controllers, battery management systems, fuel computers — as software on its processing modules.
Whether such critical hosted applications could be accessed is up for argument as is the efficacy of cyber security in general. Another expert reminded us of a line from the movie Anchorman. Referring to the alluring cologne he uses, Ron Burgundy’s broadcast cohort, Brian Fantana, says “60% of the time it works every time.”
A couple of aviation security insiders were willing to go on record about Anthem. Both contend that such systems are the way of the future and that Honeywell’s timing is appropriate.
Chris Bartlett, president of CCX Technologies, which makes cybersecurity-focused cabin routers, components, and security plans, cautioned, “This new product deserves an immense amount of thought, research, and development around cyber security to ensure it functions in a highly secure way and does not become a vulnerability."
Britton Wanik is VP of marketing with the air-to-ground network provider SmartSky Networks, for which Honeywell is a value-added reseller. He observes that “there are many landmines” for the kind of remote flight planning examples Honeywell posits. It’s a concept that goes back at least 20 years he adds and it does raise concerns.
“But those are surmountable problems that can be solved with existing security tools.”
Wanik sees a bigger challenge for Anthem security in the airborne environment where the latency and unreliability of connectivity yields an unstable, often unsecure connection to the aircraft. SmartSky’s low latency, high bandwidth networks provide a solution, he says.
The human element poses just as much of a challenge. Vipul Gupta’s affirmation that “Everyone who touches a flight is able to get information that matters to them when they need it” via Anthem is also a reminder that individuals sometimes have malevolent intentions.
Anthem guards against these with internal processes and no single point of failure with respect to safety-of-flight and other information, Gupta says. His contention that human-enabled exploits are probably less than .01% of the threat might be weighed against a recent report from Verizon
There’s also a question as to whether interested parties could build an electronic profile (as done in cyber circles) of Anthem-configured aircraft for the purpose of monitoring their movements and electronic activity.
Thanks to the FAA-required Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) Out ATC feature, the public can freely see when a general aviation, business or air transport aircraft is airborne, read its altitude, N-number and departure/destination information.
But ADS-B allows GA and business aircraft to opt-out, rendering their tail numbers, origin/destination and flight information unreadable. The option was not lost on Honeywell and is where Anthem’s “always on” mantra takes a pause.
“Connectivity can always be stopped if [the customer] chooses to do so,” Gupta acknowledges. “I fully expect that in a business aviation environment protecting the tail number and information on flying from where to where will probably be crucial. In an air transport environment it will be a different story.”
Scheduled UAM
Air transport is another point of focus for Honeywell which sees Anthem in numerous cockpits of the UAM variety. One of the keys to Anthem seen both by outside observers and within Honeywell is its scalability. Its size, weight and power requirements can be scaled to fit a large bizjet, a GA piston-single, or a small 4-passenger UAM eVTOL aircraft.
Contrary to analysts who see the UAM market emerging as a high-cost, business oriented on-demand transport mode akin to chartered helicopter service, Honeywell sees the segment in scheduled-service airline terms.
“Some of the early [UAM] segments which we see coming out are more like air transport operations rather than business aviation,” Gupta maintains. Four to five regularly scheduled UAM flights per day between paired destinations exemplify an operational model that Honeywell believes will be a firm market for Anthem.
The company has already stood up a dedicated UAM organization and its work with would-be UAM provider and customer Lillium obviously informs its outlook. Gupta says Honeywell expects Lillium’s eVTOL transport to be certified by late 2023 and operational in 2024.
If that comes to pass, Anthem will ride along and the challenges it will have to surmount in the dense RF environment of proposed UAM operations will require balancing the benefits of flight deck connectivity with the risks in an even more thorough-going way.
