Air traffic management plans advanced

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The limits of technology
Information technology is the key to Boeing's air traffic management plans, Swain said, as is extremely accurate navigation technology. Whether those enabling technologies can be developed is not a worry in his eyes. Even trickier to develop will be a consensus that the current system is not optimal, he believes.

Information technology also is "fundamentally increasing the productivity that an engineer can achieve," Swain said. "We're in an information-intense period marked by the tremendous horsepower of calculating tools. We're on the verge of being able to integrate our data flow around the company such that all our engineers can have the data they need, when the need it, and in the right format. We're not there yet, but..." The tools of the trade when he entered the profession were a brain, a handbook, a slide rule, and a Marchand calculator. Rickard recalled that when he entered the profession, doing calculations was a big part of the job. Some workers did nothing but computations, and had the official job title of "computer," Rickard noted.

Swain believes advances in information technology will obviate the need for engineers to become specialists, making them more productive. By incorporating specialist-type information into computer code, Swain explained, the brainpower that an engineer otherwise would expend on a specialty can be freed to concentrate on big-picture solutions.

Neither Rickard nor Swain believes the aerospace industry is close to the limits of technology. "There's a tendency in any era to feel like you've gone as far as you can go," Rickard said. "Maybe it's a little bit of a smug feeling to think that we took what our forebears gave us and pushed it as far as it can go. But that is almost never true."

Using existing technologies alone, engineers can improve airplane performance another 25-50% over today's levels, Swain estimates. "Then I expect there's going to be a step improvement," he said. That step improvement could come via nanotechnology (manipulation of materials on an atomic or molecular scale), which Swain said is an example of an advance that has been named but not yet fully developed. With nanotechnology, sensors can be designed to predict system failures days or even months ahead of time, according to Swain. The step improvement could come from a second class of future technology: one that is not even known.

"There was tremendous progress in the 20th century," Swain said. "And there are those who wonder if we can achieve such great accomplishments in the 21st century. "I hope the conference instills an optimism that there's no reason we can't."

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