"We are not at all at the end of the story," Charles Champion, executive vice president of engineering for Airbus, says. "There's still a great future for aviation."
Winovation
To address innovation competitiveness, Parker Hannifin has a formal innovation program, Winovation.
"Parker's innovation initiative, Winovation, has raised the bar in developing 'new-to-the-world, new-to-the-market' products and systems that help increase our customer's productivity and profitability," says Donald E. Washkewicz, chairman of the board and CEO of Parker Hannifin. "Our ongoing investments in these innovative ideas during the past number of years are beginning to bear fruit across our technology platforms and drive growth."
An offshoot of the move away from military R&D is that more doors of entry are opening for introducing new technology.
"A lot of new technological breakthroughs are not only not necessarily coming out of the military, they're not even coming out of the high-end air transport systems," Honeywell's Witwer says. "They're coming through the lower end of aviation, generation aviation or business aviation."
Pipeline of Dreams
The key to developing all of these technologies is in making sure manufacturers and suppliers are on the same page so that the technologies being honed are ones in demand by aircraft manufacturers like Airbus.
"It's really a mixture of vision and preparation of potential product decisions," Airbus' Champion says.
Airbus regularly meets with its Tier 1 suppliers to determine what technologies are in the pipeline and to share its own vision for future advancements. But the perfect marriage between manufacturer and supplier comes when new products are at technology readiness level six -- the highest level of readiness -- when they need them.
Honeywell's Witwer says the development game isn't as risky as it seems because issues like reducing operating costs and emissions and improving timeliness are "immutable values."
"Our environment doesn't change rapidly," he said.
