Singapore Airlines has introduced digital dining menus aboard all its flights, which engers can view using mobile devices. Hardcopy inflight dining menus have been removed in an effort to reduce high- items and reduce close between crew and engers when explaining dining options.
Singapore Airlines also extends holistic care for the wellbeing of their staff outside of the aircraft cabin. The airline’s internal communication platform is used to raise awareness about self-care and provide useful tips so that staff can learn about them on the go.
Beyond the pandemic and the “new normal” for travel, Singapore Airlines is looking at other long-term developments driven by technology, such as flight piloting and planning.
Paperless pilots
In the cockpit, the control tower and on the runway, paperwork has largely been replaced by tablets and mobile apps, helping improve processes, safety and efficiency.
Captain Raj Kumar, deputy chief pilot of the Boeing 777 fleet at Singapore Airlines, says the airline started a big push towards “a real paperless environment and looking at digital transformation initiatives” in 2015. One of the projects involved distributing iPads to all Singapore Airlines pilots to move towards a paperless flight-deck environment.
“Before digitisation, a flight briefing package on a 13-hour flight from Singapore to London would constitute 90 sheets of paper – covering our flight plan, any weather information and additional operational information,” Captain Raj says. But the weather during such a long flight can change dramatically – so even that paper “will not really give you a completely accurate representation of what you're going to have. But it was the best of what we had at the time.”
Now with an internet-connected tablet, pilots can review the latest weather updates, including any information about turbulence en route. The data is recorded and fed to a centralised server so that all flights have access to it ahead of time. Thanks to this technology, pilots are better able to plan with bad weather in mind, Captain Raj says. Sudden severe turbulence encounters that can cause injuries are much rarer now than a decade ago.
Augmented vision
Head-up displays now augment primary flight displays in many planes, enabling pilots to see exactly what they need to without having to refocus between what’s happening inside the cockpit and outside beyond the windscreen.
These displays show pilots the speed and navigation information right in front of their eyes. “We have a little pull-down glass combiner which projects all the information ahead of you,” says Captain Raj. And with fourth and fifth-generation head-up displays there are LED-based or laser-based projectors that are able to combine synthetic information from a 3D database with infrared cameras to show the pilot a detailed view of the outside world. “Imagine flying and approaching bad weather, or late at night when you can’t see anything outside, it looks completely dark and featureless to the naked eye. But if you look through a synthetic vision system, you are able to see a composite image of the world, including ground features and terrain with great fidelity,” says Captain Raj. “This is a huge game-changer.”
