[interview] the project story
Project Overview
The iPad app is designed to sit in the cockpit of an aircraft to guide the pilot through their essential pre-flight checks. The app also has a flypast feature (including Pebble and Apple Watch integration), ensuring perfect timings can be achieved more easily and more safely than with traditional methods.
Project Commissioner
Project Creator
Team
WingPro exists to maximise the potential of human performance in the cockpit. Fascinated by training practices and knowledge retention in aviation, their aim is to ensure the right information gets to the right place at the right time.
Rolls-Royce originally commissioned the app to assist their test pilot team. Phill O’Dell heads up Rolls-Royce’s team of test pilots, who fly a range of aircraft including restored WWII Supermarine Spitfires.
Compsoft have been specialising in mobile since 2009, having designed and developed web-based applications for many years prior. Compsoft combine stunning interface design with cutting edge development to deliver the best possible app for each customer. Our thirty-strong team lives and breathes mobile - we love nothing more than to apply our passion, creativity, skill and experience to each client’s individual requirement.
Project Brief
WingPro work with a variety of aircraft operators from business jets to light aeroplanes. The test pilot team at Rolls-Royce use WingPro’s services to enhance their training, flight safety and operations management. Rolls-Royce’s test pilots fly several different aircraft, including restored WWII Supermarine Spitfires. Pre-flight checks can be laborious and pilots typically use laminated cards to guide them through the process. This is laborious in a modern plane – with older aircraft like the Spitfire there is the added factor that modern safety measures are missing, meaning any error could be both costly and dangerous.
Rolls-Royce Chief Test Pilot Phill O’Dell came up with an innovative solution to this problem – use an iPad Mini that sits in a holder in the cockpit, and develop an app to guide the pilot through the required steps of their pre-flight checks. Phill also realised that the iPad would be the ideal tool to help him and his team meet their flypast timings with complete accuracy, enabling them to focus on far more important aspects of their flying, particularly safety and efficiency.
Project Need
Prior to this development, WingPro and Rolls-Royce spent many months researching possible ‘off the shelf’ options. None of them met requirements or were even close to the eventual capability of the app. Rolls-Royce’s Chief Test Pilot said recently at a major UK airshow: “Going bespoke was absolutely the right decision; the quality of our working relationship with the developers has been essential and greatly enabled the rapid advancement of this program.
We’ve ended up with a product that is the envy of many pilots worldwide and has greatly increased our operability and efficiency. But more importantly it has given us the time and capacity to monitor the ‘important stuff’ – we look for other aircraft more, check the aircraft’s systems, and can concentrate on flying!”
A plane like a Spitfire obviously has no built-in modern gadgets to help the pilot, and the fact that it remains the same essential plane as was flown in WWII is, in many ways, the reason it is still being flown at all. However the safety and efficiency of the pilots is no less important for that - what makes this app both innovative and unique is how it imaginatively applies and integrates 21st century technology with the much older Spitfire technology, in a way that is far from obvious, and delivers such a substantial benefit to the user.
User Experience
WingPro and Compsoft have worked closely together, benefitting from the experience of the Rolls-Royce team, to design and develop the app. Compsoft collaborated with WingPro and Rolls-Royce, first to detail the required specification, design and UX. Due to the environment in which it is used, the app design and UX is very different to many apps Compsoft has developed, with a predominantly black and white UI and large buttons which can be operated by a pilot wearing gloves. The app delivers on the requirement to enable the user to carry out the required steps easily, efficiently and without ambiguity.
The app was developed as a framework to enable it to be used for any number of different aircraft; the user flows for new aircraft (or changes to flows for existing aircraft) may be defined by the user and added to the app prior to submission of a new build.
The most recent developments have been the integration of Pebble and Apple Watch apps with the iPad app to further simplify the flypast process - this has added greatly to the effectiveness of the Display timings. Pilots are often required to arrive exactly to the second at an event; the integration with the watch apps now allow the pilot to concentrate on his separate navigation software whilst still receiving information on the arrival timing – should he speed up or slow down? Is he on time or late? All this information is now available on his wrist.
Project Marketing
To date this has been an internal business tool for use within Rolls-Royce. However, in 2016 the app will be released to the public, aimed initially at the aviation sector but later aiming to expand into other industries.
Project Privacy
As no user registration is required and no sensitive user data is entered into the app, there was no requirement to implement specific privacy measures.
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