AUSTIN, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Today, GE Aviation opened their digital collaboration center in Austin with launch customer Qantas Airways. Through the partnership, data scientists, software developers and architects from GE and Qantas will work together to distill some of the ten billion data points produced by the aviation sector annually into solutions that can achieve greater fleet intelligence and operational insights.
GE Aviation Chief Digital Officer, Jim Daily, officially opened the center with Qantas Head of Fuel and Environment Alan Milne. Local officials participating in the event included State Representative Paul Workman, State Representative Celia Israel and Ahmed Tewfix, chairperson of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Texas at Austin.
“GE’s collaboration center in Austin is home to software developers, data scientists and domain experts with specific backgrounds in analytics, flight-planning and engines, depending on what we’re working on,” says Jim Daily. “Opening the center with Qantas, marks the commitment from a customer who really understands the value of using data across their operation.”
The center is located at 400 W 15th Street in Austin at GE Aviation’s Digital Solutions headquarters in Austin, Texas. GE Aviation occupies approximately 27,000 square feet at the facility, and employs about 100 data scientists, engineers and designers. Initiatives in the pipeline could lead to a significant increase in employment in Austin for GE Aviation by the end of 2017.
“We’ve seen that even small gains in fuel efficiency add up to big benefits and lower emissions when you multiply them across the hundreds of aircraft in the Qantas fleet,” says Alan Milne. “The work we’re doing with GE is giving us more insight than we’ve ever had before into the way our aircraft operate, helping us find ways of flying smarter - and this is the next step in the partnership.”
The digital collaboration center in Austin is GE Aviation’s first in the United States. In the past year, GE opened similar centers in Dubai, Shanghai and Paris are connecting data, developers and Predix, the world’s first and only cloud-based operating system built exclusively for industry. Predix is powering innovative Industrial Internet apps that turn operational data into insight for better and faster decision making.
Today, nearly 100 airlines covering more than 10,000 aircraft are GE Aviation Digital Solutions’ customers for such services as flight and fuel analytics, navigation services, airline operations management and planning and recovery.
GE’s Power of One Percent report has estimated that the global commercial airline business is spending about $170 billion per year on jet fuel. If Industrial Internet technologies – like what is being developed in the digital collaboration centre - can achieve only one percent in cost reduction, this would represent nearly $2 billion per year – or about $30 billion in fuel cost savings over 15 years for the aviation sector globally.
Check out this video of GE’s collaboration center in Austin. See how GE Aviation’s Digital Solutions and Predix are taking aviation productivity to the next level. Click here for a video on how GE Aviation is positioned to lead the Digital Industrial Era. Click here for video on how GE Aviation’s digital solutions impact the future of air travel.
GE is the world’s Digital Industrial Company, transforming industry with software-defined machines and solutions that are connected, responsive and predictive. GE is organized around a global exchange of knowledge, the "GE Store," where each business shares and accesses the same technology, markets, structure and intellect. Each invention further fuels innovation and application across our industrial sectors. With people, services, technology and scale, GE delivers better outcomes for customers by speaking the language of industry. www.geaviation.com/digital
