The Future of Flight: Where Will We Be? Seven Characteristics of Future Products, Processes and Services

Transcription

1 The Future of Flight: Where Will We Be? Seven Characteristics of Future Products, Processes and Services Boeing Global Supplier Conference Washington, DC Bob Krieger President, Boeing Phantom Works The Boeing Company 16 September 2004 Good morning. I am going to take you on a 200-year journey. If you are thinking about the future, it helps to look in the past. So we re going to take you back 100 years, and then take you 100 years ahead, and then bring you back to where you are now. Along the way, one has to look at the products that are going to be there in the future and decide what they are. With a diverse product line we have at Boeing it s difficult to say this is the way things are going to be in this that particular area. But it turns out that there are seven characteristics of products, be they space systems, commercial airplanes, military aircraft, systems of systems or sub-systems. So in this 200-year journey, will be those characteristics. Let s start down that path and see where it takes us. Let s go back 100 years. This is what some of the world looked like then. Not a whole lot of cars, not very high speed limits. By the way, there had already been traffic fatalities, even with just 8,000 cars on the road. Las Vegas wasn t a very exciting place to be, although there might have been a gunfight or two. It was tough to get beer in cans. That s the way it was back then. We can look now at some of the stuff that was connecting and protecting us. Boeing is in the business of connecting and protecting people. A hundred years ago this is how people were connected and protected. If you look at this chart, you ll see the

2 cavalry, you ll see cannons. If you looked up at the air a hundred years ago, you might see a man-made balloon. And that s the only man-made thing you d see in the air. If you were connecting you might be on a steam-powered train, you might be on a steam ship, you might be on a carriage pulled by horses, you might have been in one of those 8,000 cars. You wouldn t have had a cell phone. You might have used a telegraph to communicate with somebody. And by the way, elevators were manned. Think about that: Transition from manned elevator to unmanned, and how dramatic that was. Now people were making predictions. Here are some of the predictions of the past: Telephones won t be a serious means of communication. Aircraft that are heavier than air are never going to fly. There will be only a few computers in the world. Probably right now in your briefcase are more than five computers for some of you. So predicting the future is kind of tough. In 1903 the Wright Brothers were tinkering in a bicycle shop and they came up with something that actually flew through the air. And from that kind of starting point and from other things that were going on at that time, came what we have now. The Boeing products that you saw earlier and those products range from the commercial airplane products to space craft to the space shuttle, the space station, the F/A-18, the military airplanes an amazing montage of products. Think of that difference. A hundred years ago the Wright Brothers flew about 120 feet. Now we have people flying half way around the world on our commercial airplanes. We have people in orbit. People have been to the moon. All in that hundred years. Now, what is it about those products, and the products of the future, that is common. Now, here is the Seven Characteristics chart you ve all been waiting for. As we go through the charts, think about what you provide to the Boeing enterprise as part of that team. I contend that your products need to move down this path and have these characteristics as we move into the future. They need to be highly integrated. They need to do more than one function. A simple case would be -- those of you who do the structures for us -- they re not just going to be load-carrying anymore. They re going to have sensors in them, and they re going to check themselves out and be smart. So, more than one function.

3 What s shown here is the Canard Rotor Wing -- a helicopter that turns into an airplane. Network-centric. Some of your products have to be part of a network. Our platforms are going to be part of a network. Our systems are networks. That means information is acquired from outside and used to do something with the product. Or, the product is providing information to something else which is using the data. Super human intelligence. Tremendous amount of processing power on board platforms in the subsystems in the component level. Smart things that are going on. Because you can process so much information. Check your health. Tell somebody I m not doing well. Adaptability to change. Many of you are in the commercial business. You know many of those commercial components are showing up on aerospace products. Those components, because of the drive in the commercial marketplace, are changing. Technology is driving capability more and more. Our products need to be adaptable to change. We put a processor in a system. A year from now that processor is obsolete. You need to be able to replace it without changing the entire system. Breakthrough performance in the way of extreme affordability. Extreme affordability means not just in the cost of the product, but in the development of the product. Get the cost out of the development of the product. Get the cost out of the production, get the cost out of the maintenance and support of the product. Universally friendly, or environmentally friendly. Some of you know we have a research center in Madrid, Spain, where about 30 people who are working and are going to fly an airplane that has hydrogen-powered fuel cells in place of the engine. If we have a very small and risk-taking pilot here, I m looking for volunteers. So if you take nothing else from my discussion think about your products and how you can be part of the global enterprise Boeing has to cause those to be part of the aerospace products of the future. Now, let me take you on some journeys here. A hundred years from now, a trip from Washington D.C. to Beijing. How fast do you think we could get there? Probably in a couple of hours. Those of you who have taken recent trips halfway around the world and watched two or three videos, done your , gotten some sleep, would probably would like to get there in a couple of hours. But that probably won t happen for another hundred years. Fifty years from now, maybe it would be a seven-hour, supersonic trip. Twenty years from now, it would probably still be a pretty slow pace. But you ll be immersed in a virtual world,

4 and you won t care that it takes 14 or 16 hours, because you will be in your virtual office. You re starting to see that with things like Connexion. And by the way, while the airplane is in the air it will be telling everyone on the ground how it s doing, whether it needs any repair or maintenance when it lands. It will be part of a network. The reason I think this 100-year vision I just painted can be there is because some of the things we re tinkering with around Phantom Works and Boeing, like 7E7, are going to start that step to the future. Ecologically friendly, quiet, easy to maintain, material systems in production that don t pollute or release hazardous materials, clear down to lead-free solder. E-enabled. The start of the e-enabled airplane. We re starting to see it. It s part of a network. It will be able to transmit and receive information. It will be a node on the network. Efficiency. Using a lot less fuel. Not just because of the engines, but because of the lightweight structure, and because of the aerodynamic design. Those are the first steps in this 100-year vision. These are things that are happening now. If you take a look at this chart, the picture on your left shows a dog sniffing out hazardous materials. That is our current state of the art. On the right hand side something Phantom Works is already looking at: a sensor on a chip which takes emerging nanotechnologies and the biotechnologies and puts them together and does the sniffing on a chip, instead of with a dog s nose. It will be awhile before this becomes reality. This is an example of putting multiple technologies into a system. How about a little farther out? We re already looking at what you need to do to fly supersonically without making all of the noise that scares people on the ground: the sonic boom. There are several technologies being looked at. One is the shaping of the airplane. Another is to get the weight down and the noise goes down. Third, using things like electron beams to change the flow to get rid of the stuff that makes the noise. It s very conceivable you will, in 20 years or so, have business jets zipping around at Mach 2 or so, able to fly over land, with no noise at all because of those emerging technologies. The other thing that relates to getting to that 100-year vision is the ability to change and modify configurations as they fly, to make them optimum for the condition they are in. That F/A-18 at the top of the picture in the graph you see is actually flying in California. The wing actually warps as it flies, to make it better performing. By the way, the Wright Brothers actually did that 100 years ago, so we re kind of catching on. The Canard Rotor Wing starts off like a helicopter and turns into a regular flying airplane. That s what I call morphing a plane. You take the capability and move it forward and you can imagine what might happen. The picture on the right of this

5 chart is a couple of unmanned vehicles flying in formation. One of the ways to get more efficient in flight is by flying in formation. You ve seen ducks and geese do it. Airplanes can do it but you have to be very accurate, and the systems are now available to do that. What about a hundred years from now? Do you think you could take a vacation to Mars? I think you could. I ll bet we ll be taking people on vacations to Mars a hundred years from now. Fifty years from now, we ll certainly have manned and robotic exploration combined. Right now we have robotic exploration going on on Mars, and probably in the next years, we ll have at least a manned visit or two. One of the reasons I think this is possible is some of the stuff going on right now with autonomous systems and robotics systems and super intelligence stuff. On the left-hand side is a satellite system we re looking at which actually repairs other satellites going into orbit, refueling satellites, taking parts off, replacing them. In 2006 we re going to fly one of these, go up in service. A satellite shows you can do it. On the right-hand side -- a lot of fun last year for those of you that got caught up in the Grand Challenge which was the race from Barstow, California, to Las Vegas with autonomous systems. If you look closely at the vehicle on the right-hand side of the chart, you don t see a person in it, but you see a lot of clap trap on top. That replaces the person. So you re still okay. It takes a lot more to replace you than just something your size, but hang on because the next generation which by the way the next race will be October It s going to be a lot more compact than that. It doesn t take long for the technology to shrink things down. That s the integration of multiple systems. By the way that thing is designed to drive up to 70 miles an hour off road without a person in it and make decisions along the way. Technology is coming. Robotics are here, and are going to get better and better as we integrate all those characteristics that I talked about earlier. As far as high-performance systems I already talked about the X-43 the hypersonic vehicle, which by the way in a month or two is going to fly at Mach 10. That means by the way about 7,000 miles an hour. That s pretty fast. Way faster than a speeding bullet to put it into perspective. On the right-hand side is a Jupiter Icy Moon Orbiter which is a concept right now to put together an instrumentation package and go out and explore the moons of Jupiter, but it s going to use nuclear propulsion. And nuclear propulsion is just starting to be developed and to be safe and usable perhaps for manned flights in the future. By the way, I talked about the hour flight to Beijing. It takes seven months to get to Mars. With a nuclear propulsion system you can cut the time in half or more. Fantastic change in performance. Also, when you think about long trips like that three months cooped up, one of the things that you might want to do is really immerse yourself in the virtual world. On

6 the right-hand side of this chart is a depiction of a virtual world in which we re interacting with a scene. People interacting with a scene as if they re in it and some of you probably provide those systems. Some of you have actually been involved and explored what it s like to be in a virtual world. But that s where we are now. If you could imagine even years from now where that capability will be and how real it will get. As you go further and as we start exploring the solar system and all these long flights my sense is that the virtual world will go with us and those flights will be a lot more acceptable to man and we won t have to put them in suspended animation. They will be working every day just like they work at home. Just like they really maybe don t want to do, but that could happen. The left-side chart is just a depiction of really an example of an integrated system in terms of what we can do in space with structural elements that also sense their environment and then adjust themselves. They sense where the sun is. They sense where the thermal degradients are and they readjust themselves. For instance, if you need to point something very accurately, they automatically do that. Kind of super-intelligent, high integrated. A couple of the seven characteristics. Another thing to look at in the future is natural disasters and how we cope with them. A hundred years from now I could conceive of the fires in California not even getting a chance to start more than a wisp of smoke because of systems that are watching them from space in the atmosphere just watching for stuff to happen and then quickly reacting to it and doing something about it. Fifty years from now, you would probably need a mixture of the person and people in the loop in the sensor systems. Twenty-five years from now sensors cueing people to go do something about these situations. So the evolution is on its way. It s on its way because we have fantastic sensor systems and platforms to carry them nowadays. The unmanned combat air vehicle on the left side is carrying packages of sensors. In the upper right the funny looking diamond thing has the sensors integrated into the airplane and that s what makes it look funny. The radar system is also a wing. On the bottom right is the integration of the person with the machine. At this very moment we re looking at something called Augmented Cognition. That means if you have an operator on the ground of some of these systems that are up there orbiting and doing surveillance of that operator s condition, his health, his stress level is monitored and as the stress level goes up the information changes that is provided to him. The way I characterize this -- and my human factors people don t like this -- if you get an overflow of information, the system will keep pulling it back and pulling it back and try to get your stress level under control. Finally, it says to you, Hey, dummy push the button and that s it. Okay.

7 The point is that the distinction between the human and the machine will get blurred and blurred and blurred with time and I don t know if that s good or bad, but it s happening. It s happening right now. If you re out there from a military point of view or from the disaster relief point of view sometimes you need big payload capability to bring in either equipment, water to douse fires, etc. On the left-hand side we re playing with an airplane you may have heard of it s called the Pelican which carries over a million pounds of payload. It flies just off the tops of waves, very very heavy payload, very long-range. Lots of need for the capability to get the structure weight down, to get the propulsion system efficiency up and to control that type of vehicle. Concept on paper right now. Another concept on paper is kind of a C-17 type thing on the right side advanced theater transport. It carries heavy loads, but also lands on unprepared surfaces, but by the way before it lands it checks them out through remote sensing to see whether or not it can carry the load. It is a combination of looking at both the sensor capability and modern technology which is able to penetrate ground and see what materials are below the ground. But overhead, up in the sky, you are being watched or will be watched. The lefthand side is the concept of space-based radar. The radar system in space that looks down on the ground and tries to determine what s moving, what s not and then track that at very very accurate levels. On the right-hand side of that montage of things is a space-based surveillance system. So you can watch the ground. How about watching space and what s going on in space and whose moving around and where things are going? So you have all this capability. The integrated sensors, watching the ground, watching space, and those systems are giving you coverage globally on situational awareness. Right now both are on the drawing boards, but both certainly 25 years from now will be in place. A hundred years from now the surveillance capability will be unbelievable and whatever needs to be watched can be watched. So then to take you back then to where I started. Lots of different things on the drawing board. Some of it is operating now. Some of it just paper. Some of it still in the form of ideas that are feasible and certainly could be in place 25 years from now and will set the future for the next 100 years. But there are seven characteristics of those systems. Platforms and systems that have decision-making capability far better than human already on the drawing boards as the computational capability improves that becomes more and more powerful. Extreme affordability and extreme is not the 10 percent or so that you often face. It s the orders-of-magnitude changes as the new technology comes onboard. As the integration of systems happens the cost gets significantly reduced as the ability to do virtual design improves. Universally friendly systems that have essentially no environmental impact throughout their life cycle. We re moving down that path as we speak and as we see the products of the future evolve. Network centric systems no question it will have

8 the multiple assets that are parts of the networks that can help optimize the system performance. The highly integrated systems, the morphing systems, the multi-function systems taking single components that do many things, are already starting. Major breakthroughs in performance and by the way performance is not just speed and altitude, etc. It s reliability, it s maintainability, it s all those factors that come into play to make a system work. And then finally adaptability to change. The ability to have a system that you can easily change. In general, we talked about in terms of avionics, but how about structures and things like that where you can now do your designs such as you can incorporate new material systems as they come on board or integrated systems. More and more we call them open systems. Open systems are becoming more and more relevant to the future integration of the future. So Phantom Works itself is an area or a research organization that has this vision that s shown here. One thing I wanted to point out in the vision is it says, Working across the Boeing global enterprise. Phantom Works is kind of like the bicycle shop where the Wright Brothers had a few more things in it than bicycles. But you re also part of that bicycle shop. You have research that is going on. You have visions of the future. You know where your products are going or where you like them to go and that s going to create the future of aerospace. The bicycle shop is no longer a single entity. It s the total enterprise that creates that future, and this montage shows you what some of that future may be like. This could be the products of the future, but remember my chart that talked about predicting the future. I would bet that the future will not look like this. It will look like something different, but it will be well beyond where we are today, and it s the enterprise that does that. It s our decisions on what we re going to work on, what technologies we re going to develop, what processes, what systems that will make it. So as you make your decisions and as you work with us what it asks you to do is think about those seven characteristics. Your products and your services should be moving in that direction because those are the things that are going to make us successful in the future. With that I thank you very much for your attention and open up the session for questions and answers by the way. Nobody wants to go to Mars? Q: We re a direct supplier to Boeing and also to one of your larger suppliers. Our relationships with Boeing are very good right now. No complaints, but that s not always been the case with us. Some of our Research and Development ends up in intellectual property and that s really the business that we re in. You re in that business too. I m just wondering if you could comment on steps that Boeing is taking to ensure protection of intellectual property and respect for those intellectual property rights that are developed by small business entities.

9 A: Okay, you heard the question. Intellectual property rights and the steps we re taking to protect the rights of our suppliers. We recently formed an Intellectual Property Business which has helped Boeing itself focus on intellectual property and protection of intellectual property and development of strategies. So within Boeing you ll find more emphasis maybe than you re already aware of on making sure we have strategies in place that we can protect what s developed internally. In addition to that then we re looking very much at the ability and the utility of licensing from our global enterprise intellectual property, making sure that indeed we have an integrated strategy across the enterprise that provides that protection of the intellectual property. If we work together with you, the collaboration agreements that we put together absolutely address the ownership of intellectual property. There are variations about it, but that s very specific and research on very specific parts of any collaboration that we enter into with you. By the way, collaboration is a sharing where you do some investment, we do some investment and we lay out the rules in advance for that. The whole idea being, we like that value to be focused on the particular research, but in addition we generally will give rights for other applications to you and that becomes part of the discussion process. So I think the system has improved greatly over the years that I have been involved, and the sensitivity to the value of intellectual property is much higher and we re trying to work that through all of our agreements. Q: I wonder if you could comment on the process that you use to decide which projects, which technologies that you re going to emphasize or fund in a big way and to what extent intuition factors in? A: There are several processes but two that I ll talk about. For near term research focus, we at Phantom Works work with the business units to define common needs across military and commercial and that is a very involved process of the business units getting together saying, Hey we re going this way. We ll need this capability, and because it s common Phantom Works we ll develop this particular research area. Composite materials are a good example of that. Composite material systems apply to a wide range of products at Boeing. Phantom Works works on those. So that s a need integrated with the strategy of the Business Unit. Then there s a second aspect which is beyond the current product line or the next generation of what we work on. We actually go through a strategic innovation planning process looking out into the future just like I did here, but we look out years and say what is the world going to be like? What capability might be emerging? And then where should we go then? That s where the intuition comes in more so than the needs driven approach. There it is with some data, some kind of estimating visualizing where the future will be, our senses we re going to go this way or the world is going to go this way and that s where we should go. So you collect data and then you make your decision for that longer-term research. That s a fairly volatile area because also behind that is what s happening out there in the rest of the world in your community, driven by things other than aerospace and we also watch that and pool it. But the intuition piece comes into play on the longer term and allows us to be a little more creative in our investments.

10 Q: I m a member of the George Jetson generation and when I was young I d be home watching with excitement the little planes flying around all over the country and all over the city. Now that I m grown up and I m part of DHL and we have hundreds of thousands of little yellow vans I wonder if you might comment on the opportunity to get some of that Jetson technology in use for a personal use or for a small parcel delivery? A: This is my favorite subject. Personal transportation systems is what I ve just been asked about. We have a vision in Phantom Works -- this is the fun part that some time in the future you will be flying to work just like you drive to work right now. Maybe 50 years, maybe 100 years, maybe 25 years. It s going to happen. So the Jetson picture is going to happen some time. I often talk about the airplane. What s going to happen? Is the airplane going to come down and drive along the highway or is the automobile going to lift off and come up and fly in the sky? Well, any of you who have been watching the auto industry know that Toyota and Honda have airplanes now. So I think it s happened. There are probably 10,000 airplanes in the air in the United States. Think about 100 million in the air in the United States. Think about the Air Traffic Management System that would be required to manage 100 million of these things. Think about talking on your cell phone while you re flying in three dimensions and I m sure none of you do that in two dimensions right? So here s what has to happen. Here s what I think has to happen. We have to get to the point where flying is as easy as driving an automobile. That s a major step towards the Jetson picture and that s frankly where we re focused right now making that an easy process. We have to get to where the propulsion systems, the noise involved with them, are very reliable systems. In effect, the thing that flies has to be more reliable by orders of magnitude than a current commercial airplane is, because if you have 100 million things in the air at one time you can t have very many of them fall out of the sky on a daily basis. We tolerate a lot of accidents on the highways. You re not going to tolerate things falling through our roof. I m telling you I can go on for hours on this one. So it s ultra-reliability, and absolute easiness of the human/machine interface. By the way, that s code for, Don t let the driver drive. You can sit in there and play with the wheel, but it s going to go the right way no matter what. Then the third is the system to handle it. Whether it s an Air Traffic Management System, whether it s truly fully autonomous where you sense where you are, etc. You ve got to have all three of those things fall in place before the Jetson picture happens, but it s going to happen, it s going to happen. It s going to be a fun ride and the roots are now in place. That was a fun question and I d like to spend hours on it, but if you can catch me in some hidden place I ll pull out another 100 charts and talk to you about it