I think aviation as a whole is ripe for massive disruption. I think the end result will be much smaller planes that do point to point but the exact 'how will it happen' is still an unknown. This will force regulatory changes too since a lot more smaller = totally different airspace management and cockpit requirements (please allow autonomous!). My personal bet for the disruptor to do it is is on electric. Look at the graph of battery capacity/kg/year and it is clear that electric will out-pace JET-A in the not distant future. The benefits are massive when that happens since (as the article points out) developing engines is a huge part of the challenge. Electric engines are going to be vastly easier to design and certify and provide massive new options since they can be mounted in new ways making aircraft more efficient and cheaper to build and operate. They will also likely change the altitudes and speeds that aircraft fly at since the same issues that impact turbofan engines don't impact electric (there are other issues obviously though).
The industry is very entrenched in regulation that is not going to change anytime soon. I just find it difficult to imagine any room for disruption with an agency like the FAA having full control over who and what gets to pilot an airplane, but also hates to certify experimental aircraft. Autonomous aircraft are going to be a century away at least due in part to red tape because there is almost no on-ramp to enter this industry.
I am also not hopeful for battery technology as, unlike cars, where we are not weight sensitive, commercial aircraft rely on being able to land lighter than they took off due to fuel burn. In small aircraft, battery storage can work for short runs, but we’re going to need to see some sort of fuel cell system for anything commercially viable.
Innovation can happend in places where FAA has no say. There are a lot of countries using short distance flights where electric airplanes would drive down costs a lot.
E.g. Scotland, some intercity flights in Europe and between a lot of small islands such as Sint Maarten.
Short inter-city distances over land run into competition from high speed rail. Which I know is not a thing in the Americas, but is all over Europe and can compete with turboprop airliners on point-to-point time. (Remember, railway stations are almost all in the centre of the departure/arrival city and there's no security theatre to delay your boarding: also, service frequency on some high speed inter-city routes is as high as one departure every fifteen minutes, utterly unlike Amtrak.)
Scotland isn't really a market for short distance electric flights unless you're thinking of the Highlands and Islands, where less than 10% of the population is scattered across crinkle-cut fjords.
France/Netherlands to Sint Maarten/St. Martin is, IIRC, served by wide-body airliners because it's both legally part of France itself (at least the St. Martin half of the island) and it's a significant tourist resort.
And if you think the EU and UK have laxer safety/regulatory standards than the FAA, you might want to re-think your position ...
Only someone unversed in the aerospace industry could make such a claim. The barrier to entry is vast. It isnt like other industries where you can break things and rapidly innovate. Ive seen first hand how hard it is to translate innovation onto the factory floor. For example there is innovation on AI or more accurately neural nets for the complex software governing landing gears that is functionally impossible to implement. What already exists, is essentially a million line IF statement governing every atmospheric condition and different angle gradient. The trick is getting the new innovation past the regulator in such a way that it is demonstrably more safe.
What currently exists, presumably took decades to write and improve and tweak for every possible scenario and is extremely robust. It is also proprietary vital software out of control of both Airbus and Boeing. Meaning it is both expensive and creates a huge amount of leverage on the part of the supplier as no aircraft can be delivered without a landing gear and there is a very limited amount of companies who can produce it.
While the neural nets perform better in lab scenarios it is probable the innovation will never be permitted to be deployed as it is extremely difficult to demonstrate if it is superior and more crucially: safer, than the tried and tested horreondous milion line statement. It could take 5-10 years of further testing and its only objective may be to just have some leverage in negotations (that both parties will know is very weak ammunition).
The second bottleneck is you need a huge ecosystem of suppliers (much like the electric's ecosystem in Shenzhen) which can rapidly and safely fulfill purchase orders. The manufacturing is about the highest most precise manufacturing there is. Just to train someone to install parts on the assembly line can take 12-18 months. Also some suppliers such as CFMA, Rolls royce, P&W, GE will never entertain a small start up because why would they?
They plan production in terms of 5-10 years and they need deep commitments to satisfy their creditors and their workforce. Can a startup sign a 10-15 year service agreement that guarantees revenue for maintenance? Can a start up guarantee other types of corporate agreements on spare parts or engineering workshops or the other thousand myriad different exchanges of information.
These plants produce engines on maybe a monthly or quarterly basis. The parts inside the engines are protected on a national security basis as they are so difficult to manufacture. The engineering IP is a genuine national security risk as it can be translated into jet fighters.
Aerospace industry is about as open to disruption as big pharma is. Its surrounded by arcane redtape such as Airworthiness directives that are designed to make sure no one dies.
Where you could see innovation is electric or hydrogen for short haul flights on smaller planes. The problem is the batteries and hydrogen especially, can be more dangerous than the current kerosene. And again only shorthaul. For long-haul it is likely kerosene is never replaced bar some unforseen revolution in materials science not seen in 50-100 years. You cannot fudge the physics of weight, density and speed versus power output.
The MTOW (Max take of weight) for batteries is vastly higher than kerosene and the energy is used up far faster. The aerospace manufacturers are researching green jet fuel which could be a good way to reduce emissions.
The regulators will never slacken on the rigidity of the regulation. It is so easy to make a minor mistake in manufacturing that can result in a mass casuality event.
In fact for every new engineer that joins Airbus, they are first shown a musuem dedicated to all victims of previous disasters to demonstrate what is at stake and how important engineering excellence is.
I think often disruptive innovation in mature industries must come from vertically integrated companies doing relatively small products. You can't get innovation by using all the same components as everyone else and all the same manufacturing tooling. Though you of course still utilize many, just not everything. For example in the car industry you start with some hand built sports cars before scaling. Your key innovation might be in-house or use a non traditional industry supplier. In aircraft industry you could start with UAV:s and then maybe light aviation or business aircraft.
Right now one area which could be a seed for huge future change could be E-VTOL companies. The technologies, processes and culture they have could change the industry a lot in the long term.
The problem with aviation is that if you get your innovation wrong, people die.
With E-VTOL, which is presumably aiming for local-to-local flights, you have the added problem that if you get your innovation wrong, potentially bystanders on the ground die when your flying car falls on them.
It's absolutely not impossible to do it right (i.e. with nobody dying). But if you do that you need to hit existing aerospace engineering safety standards for stuff like multiply redundant flight control systems, traffic routing that avoids extensive flight over densely populated areas, and so on.
And then you discover you're competing with an unexpected combination like, say, robo-taxis feeding a high speed rail station with 220mph trains running every 15 minutes and your business model turns out to be the new Zeppelin, not the DC-3.
For example some E-VTOL systems have six quite independent systems, each with a battery, motor and propeller. I think it helps the design to be more fault tolerant. Helicopters are allowed many things even when they are noisier and don't have similar redundancy.
There was a scheduled helicopter between Helsinki and Tallinn. It was somewhat expensive but not unreasonable. Much faster than a ship of course. It crashed, everyone died. They continued later but stopped eventually. They are complex mechanical solutions with very high maintenance requirements.
