The beleaguered aviation industry will emerge from the COVID-19 crisis transformed, and aviation entrepreneurs see opportunities for reinventing it.
With air travel grinding nearly to a halt, predictions for airlines and others in the aviation industry are dire. The International Air Transport Association expects air carriers worldwide to see revenues drop by more than half this year. Airbus Chief Executive Guillaume Faury said, “We are in the gravest crisis the aerospace industry has ever known.” The timeworn allusion to the Chinese word for “crisis” comprising both “danger” and “opportunity” comes to mind. Though not entirely accurate, it is a call to action for entrepreneurs.
Back in 2013, doctor and inventor Arthur Kreitenberg and his son, Elliot, approached airlines about a device that disinfects airplane cabins using ultraviolet-C (UVC) light. The response was less than expected. Then, following the Ebola outbreak in 2014, Virgin America (now part of Alaska Airlines) granted the Kreitenbergs access to airliners so they could create the device, called the GermFalcon.
At the time no airlines were interested, so the Kreitenbergs started working with hospitals instead. But in the past two months, “there’s been a change of heart” in the airline market, the younger Kreitenberg said. In January, Kreitenberg offered free use of GermFalcon and a similar device for airports to help the air travel industry during the pandemic. Paine Field near Seattle, WA is now a customer and investor.
New ideas need cultivation to come to fruition, and this is rare in an industry as risk-averse as aviation, in which safety is paramount. “Regulations have taken risk-taking away, and not even swashbuckling risk, but even a way of looking at the future as something you can construct,” said Saras Sarasvathy, of the University of Virginia Darden School of Business. As a result, many innovations may never be realized, he added.
Sometimes the opportunity lies within a setback, as Luke Miles, co-founder of London-based industrial design firm New Territory discovered. He developed a way to make aircraft seating more comfortable, but was daunted by the long and costly government approval process required for an entirely new seat design. So he created Interspace, a seat that already meets government regulations. “Sometimes, it is not about grand moves and everything has to change,” Miles said.
Another success story is that of Polish businessman Stan Malicki. He invented a system that uses an electric track, rather than engine thrust, to get airplanes off the ground. His company, Aircraft Towing Systems (ATS), said it could save U.S. carriers millions of gallons of fuel each year and lower carbon emissions. The company eventually got the attention of Vince Howie, Aerospace and Defense Director for the Oklahoma Department of Commerce. He convinced Malicki to move from Europe to Oklahoma, and ATS worked with Oklahoma State University to develop a prototype. A true believer, Howie became CEO late last year.
