Engineer the Risk Out of the Operation

Both costly and potentially deadly, ground damage is a problem that continues to plague the industry.

Joe Griffith, commercial manager for Mallaghan, specifies ground damage as damage incurred outside the normal operation of an aircraft; external factors that damage the aircraft.

“If the aircraft has an engine failure from low oil pressure or similar,that's not a ground damage. If it occurred on the ground, it's a blessing, because they weren't up in the air. But, to me, ground damage is something that's incurred through external forces to the aircraft,” Griffith says.

The most common forms of ground damage include pieces of equipment impacting aircraft, or aircraft ingesting objects that were improperly stowed or left in poor positions.

“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen a belt-loader run into the side of an aircraft because someone jumped off with it in gear, assuming the parking brake will hold,” Griffith says.

Griffith, who before joining Mallaghan worked for a major airline’s ground support equipment (GSE) group in engineering and fleet management, says that in his experience, 80% of ground damage is a result of human error. Largely, the remaining percentile of damage is due to equipment failures – products breaking or sensors not functioning correctly, for example.

Mindfulness, Griffith says, is the first step a person can take to ensure they stay on their tasks and accomplish them successfully.

From his time in the airline industry, he notes situational awareness is key to avoiding accidents.

“More often than not, someone would get complacent in what they were doing. They would do the same thing over and over and over. And, they would forget that it may work for you, you may be able to jump off that belt-loader and leave it in drive, throw the parking brake on, then hop back on. But, that belt-loader you just hopped on, happened to have a parking brake that was loose, it didn't hold when you pulled it up,” Griffith describes.

It is imperative for ground personnel to be aware of the fact that not every unit of GSE functions the same every time.

“Aircraft's different specs and belt-loaders and braking distances, and locks on containers, and container loader approach speeds. They're all different. Going into the situation saying, ‘I've done it a hundred times’ and just operating off instinct is an incident waiting to happen,” Griffith adds.

Going into each situation with a clean mindset, leveraging basic training and best practices of the job at hand, along with looking at the whole of the current situation and assessing the potential risks are Griffith’s recommendations.

“Check the brakes on the belt-loader, check to make sure the parking brake's holding. Thirty seconds of prevention, of analysis, will prevent hours, weeks, years of financial, or God forbid, human pain or loss,” Griffith says.

Only Human

The human machine can only do so much; at some point, biology will override even the most attentive and studious worker. Whether it be from fatigue, stress, distrations or other outside factors, human error will crop up from time to time.

With technology, though, human error in ground damage is beginning to be engineered out of the equation.

“I’m a firm believer in 80-20, you’re never going to get rid of all of it. If you can identify your major drivers and that being human factors, the best way to do it is to engineer out the human factor,” says Griffith.

Controlled approach is a technical measure that Mallaghan is building into its GSE, allowing the machine to take action independently of the operator to avoid aircraft collision.

“[Controlled approach] utilizes several very high power, 3D cameras and distance sensors, and programs and logic controllers, that are making calculations to determine relative distance to an aircraft and slow the vehicle down, along with then applying the brakes,” Griffith says.

Mallaghan has been developing their controlled approach technology for five years and the feature is incorporated into most of the GSE the company produces.

“We’ve leveraged major players in the space of detection sensors and hardware to develop a system that works extremely well for us. And then, we leverage our own internal engineering and programming designers to help us make that system work flawlessly in the application,” Griffith says.

Retrofitting the technology onto GSE can become difficult given the processes the system needs to interface with to work successfully, such as braking, electrical and internal computer systems.

“The older it gets, the more difficult it becomes, is the best way to say it. Purpose-built equipment is the easiest. Commercial chassis presents challenges. And then, every older year of commercial chassis becomes exponentially more difficult to make it work, because, even five, six years ago, some vehicles’ throttle and brake systems had no computer reference at all,” Griffith explains.

“Now, when you press the pedal on a new truck, it runs through a computer. So, you can interrupt those signals and you can apply brakes, because of the level of computer integration. But without that, it becomes exceptionally difficult,” he continues.

Mallaghan works closely with other original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) utilizing their technology to ensure successful integration during production.

Controlled appraoch is initiated with the flip of one or two switches and pressing the engage button. Getting trained on the system is equally easy, taking only 15 to 20 minutes — all designed around limiting the human factor.

“The system itself needs to be intuitive,” Griffith says. “A properly designed system that’s done right, you don’t want to have extensive training. If it requires eight hours of training, that’s eight hours of human factors that you’re having to put into it.”

That said, Griffith still stresses the need for mindfulness in operations and not becoming complacent just because an operator’s GSE has this technology built into it.

“Nothing’s perfect. There is always the potential for these things. Diligence, vigilance, is probably the biggest thing. If you become complacent and you’re relying on that anti-collision system, and let’s say that there was a failure of something and the unit’s not slowing down, interjecting or getting involved would be key,” he says.

The Technology of Tomorrow, Today

Griffith says that he sees GSE technology evolving to incorporate the internet of things (IoT), where GSE, airport infrastructure and the aircraft themselves will all communicate. He anticipates in eight to 10 years, the technology will be ubiquitous.

Working to bring that technology to the market is EmbedTek.

Kent Tabor, president and CTO, EmbedTek, says one of the technologies they are developing uses 3D imaging to create a map of the airfield where GSE is located. This map could be used by GSE to navigate the ramp with the dimensions of aircraft included.

“If you know the 3D geometry of vehicles and aircraft and you can accurately identify at least one physical point on each of these objects plus their orientation, you have everything you need. With software that is similar to that used for CAD, you can predict potential collisions or interferences of things before they happen,” Tabor says.

“If you were about to drive a baggage vehicle under a wing but you just happen to have a conveyor up too high, the system could alert you that, if you continue in that vector, you will collide with the plane wing in 3D space,” he adds.

The system would work much like a backup sensor on a car, but without the need for a camera to be on the GSE. Tabor explains maps could be created inexpensively using navigation technology used by drones and then relayed to the GSE.

“Basically, it’s a virtual 3D copy of the real objects in real time. So as you’re backing up, the system knows that a part of your vehicle is 10 feet from a portion of a plane and a display in your vehicle can show you an animated image of what’s behind you without actually mounting cameras or other sensors that are expensive and provide limited feedback,” says Tabor.

This technology could be further enhanced by utilizing artificial intelligence (AI). Tabor points to research done where AI was able to predict that someone was about to come around a door before they were within a camera’s view by noticing minute details.

“It sounds impossible, but really it is that the pixels just show a slight difference of when a person gets close to being within view. Their presence would produce ultra-subtle reflections off the wall and the floor, stuff your eyes would never even notice, the camera system can detect,” he says.

GSE could utilize AI to pick up, for example, the moment the shadow of a plane or person not in its original map came into view and stop itself before an accident. Then through noticing patterns and learning its environment, the GSE’s AI could begin to predict events and take action before they register to anyone else on the ramp.

The AI would learn to take these steps over constantly monitoring the actions taken and learning the normal patterns of that GSE’s operations. Then when an action happened that deviated from that norm, the AI would step in to alert an operator or take steps itself to prevent a potential accident.

“If an event happens that seems questionable and could cause a problem once, you can record the event in the AI system as being something not to do,” Tabor explains. “When things are always going right, it just keeps on recording it in AI and then as soon as it finds an anomaly, it gives you an alert that you’re doing something different than what the normal is.”

Tabor says they have designed a similar AI system for a customer that performs pneumatics failure analysis and algorithms that would predict failures.

“By using AI, you can train what is normal and what is not,” says Tabor.

Tabor says the technology to make it all happen already exists. The only thing that hasn’t been done yet is to utilize it in the airport environment.

“All the technology that we need to accomplish this already exists, and so it’s not like having to develop a new class of expensive sensors or anything else,” Tabor says. “If you can’t obtain the 3D model from the manufacturer of the vehicle or plane, there is equipment available today that you can buy or rent to create this 3D image yourself using LiDAR or 3D cameras.”

Tabor theorizes it would take less than six months to scan everything and create a functional 3D map of a tarmac. The technology could be easily retrofitted onto existing GSE.

“Most vehicles already have what is called a CAN bus interface that makes available a lot of that information such as speed, GPS location and heading. By interfacing that CAN bus and fusing that data with other sensors plus data from the 3D system, equipment like a baggage handler vehicle, can implement this technology without the need to add another GPS or heading sensor,” he says.