Digital transformation has been reshaping the aerospace and defense industry, with emerging technologies offering new possibilities for efficiency. What does this look like at CAE, a worldwide partner of choice in civil aviation, defense, and security?
We sat down with Andy Windon, who currently serves as the Vice President of Engineering and Technology at CAE Defense and Security.
In this interview, Andy discusses how integrating emerging technologies and innovations is a game changer and how CAE's methodical approach ensures successful integration and continuous improvement.
To learn more about Andy’s expert insights into the aerospace and defense industry, we invite you to continue reading below.
Please briefly introduce yourself with your role and main responsibilities at CAE Defense and Security?
I am Andy Windon, the Vice President of Engineering and Technology at CAE Defense and Security (D&S).
My primary role is leading the engineering aspects of CAEs US and international defense and security businesses and collaborating with our corporate Global Technologies and Products (GTP) organization, focusing on training, mission readiness, and safety for our service men and women worldwide.
We support enterprise IT and cyber security, core product software, systems, hardware, and cyber engineering, and US-based production. We also have an Internal Research and Development (IRAD) team and product development portfolio chartered within the defense segment to assess customer needs and drive enabling technology investments and solutions on-time to meet those capability needs.
It's actually a very broad expertise the Engineering and Technology organization brings to the D&S enterprise and our customer community. I’m blessed to be a part of it.
How do you see the role of digital transformation evolving in the aerospace and defense industry over the next decade? What emerging technologies are most promising for advancing digital capabilities?
There's an extensive paradigm shift going on in the DoD to better leverage high-end digital design, modeling, analysis and process tools, and evaluation as a core element of ongoing initiatives and acquisitions. We also see this push internationally, where digital twins and complex simulated operational environments are what our customers talk about. Specifically in the training and safety realm, human immersion in complex tasks through a digital representation of their world can both accelerate and reduce the cost of proficiency.
These digital initiatives posture the defense marketplace to improve design automation and development maturity, accelerate capability time-to-market, and reduce the non-recurring engineering that goes into new products.
For example, how do you get a capable solution to the warfighter quicker without a typical multi-year development cycle? For us, we focus on leveraging Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) hardware and then rapidly developing and reusing our critical IP through an efficient software lifecycle, focusing on a simplified DevSecOps pipeline, tailorable, cross-functional scaled-agile operation, automated testing, heavy use of containerization and virtual machines, and a growing MBSE footprint to streamline requirements development and tech stack reuse.
We are also working, through standardized Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) tools, to accelerate automated hardware design and parts list creation, configuration control, parts and part obsolescence tracking, predictive maintenance, and E-exchanges with our suppliers.
As far as our enterprise and customer-facing products go, we are also deeply invested in leveraging machine learning and artificial intelligence as a critical technology area that helps bring the power of big data analytics and predictive capabilities to provide quick, novel solutions to uniquely targeted problems.
Those are some things that are evolving in our general workplace, but with the digitization of how our customers think and do business today, CAE plays a central role. We are focused on safety and operational readiness, and we do that by maintaining the highest-quality digital environment, representing the world our customers train in and for.
Into that digital world, you can inject mission relevant entities, including cars, airplanes, boats, landscapes, and buildings, even replicating people and their daily patterns of life, and then use algorithms for each object to realistically interact with the trainee. That digital environment serves as a focal point and the enabling hub for mission readiness training. With this digital environment, I then can plug in training devices and have people train collaboratively, no matter where they sit, using a common digital world with a human-environment interface tailored to the right level of complexity that supports their training needs.
It is a very rich landscape for D&S to have that aligns well with the digital pivot the military customers are making.
Through collaboration with CAE's Commercial and Business Aviation teams and manufacturing center, we regularly leverage their experiences in the commercial marketplace over into our D&S arena. 3D printing and the ability to go directly from a CAD tool to the printing machine and skip the paper has been huge. It helps us reduce costs, speeds up availability, and allows complex geometries to be built in a single pass.
For example, in some customer applications, we create high-complexity replicas of cockpits to ensure pilots experience the tactile feel of buttons, switches, and displays while being visually immersed in their training environment, either through virtual reality goggles or a full visualization dome. Training is all about the effectiveness of the device, which helps the pilot learn the platform, procedures, and missions. Building a physical device capable of sustaining 4g’s acceleration generally isn’t required, so we are able to quickly take the actual, original cockpit design information and affordably decompose it into outsourced vs in-house assembled parts vs in-house printings. That's an example on the manufacturing side.
Through model-based systems engineering, we can also quickly establish and control interfaces. This enables us to plug and play into our COTS hardware and software development pipeline to accelerate integration time. It is another amazing capability that is facilitated by the digitization of our tech stack and design flow.
We also invest in developing and deploying AI technologies. A beautiful thing about generative AI in particular is you can prompt it, and it can recommend or provide a draft of something that a human then reviews and can edit and tailor—but it truly accelerates the development cycle of certain content. We are focused on maximizing the value large language model-based applications bring by using CAE-specific information to tailor responses for our customer applications.
Artificial intelligence is a powerful tool in the marketplace today. Still, we must remember that it is an algorithm, albeit a powerful one, used to solve a problem and provide a benefit. Given the open-source nature of those AI algorithms today, success typically resides in your data and how you make it valuable for your application.
What are the biggest challenges that you've encountered in integrating new technologies into existing systems and thoughts on how to begin to overcome them?
CAE has been in the training business for over 75 years. Our immense, modern tech stack still spans decades of product applications. The reality is until you can communicate the customer benefits of a new technology, they will see it as a cost, schedule, or training downtime risk. It is much easier to be transformational with internal systems and processes than with customer-facing solutions simply because the provides-benefit OODA loop is smaller.
When you take new technology and try to insert it, often the targeted, legacy product wasn’t built with that technology in mind. An example is power over ethernet (PoE); a standard for the last two decades, but how many systems built in the 1990s knew to provision for it? Because of marketplace innovation, newer tech sometimes comes with added computational burdens, networking needs, or perhaps a new foundational architecture that all require consideration despite the intended benefit. Clean sheet designs are typically the best opportunity to reset technologies, but these are rare and typically the most expensive way to bring a product to market.
At CAE, we take a product management approach to our core technologies. We identify an enabling technical nugget that we want to grow over time and then mature and deploy it across our products. We essentially plug those product managers into the product lifecycle and roadmaps, and very slowly, we begin to make those risk-managed transformational maneuvers, with communication on the what-when-why-how as a focal point.
"Technology is only as valuable as the benefit it brings to the end user."
We’ve always found it effective to have conversations around the features and benefits of what we’re trying to do differently, discussing the reasons, timing, risks, and costs. By involving stakeholders and decision-makers, transformation is generally accepted at a faster pace.
There are times, however, when we recognize an opportunity in the marketplace and say, we're pivoting now. For example, at CAE, we recently invested in an Unreal gaming engine-based image generator (IG) we call Prodigy, bringing unrivaled content and contextual reality to the market, achieving Level D certification, and deployment into customer training operations.
This is a case where we invested in a technology and customer benefit and have been deliberately, methodically moving it into our product portfolios. It takes time, but once you show customer value in feature richness, visual acuity, and most importantly, training benefits, you get them on board quickly. Some things you take your time with; others you say, we're doing it now.
How is CAE leveraging digital transformation to position itself for future growth, particularly in the space sector? How do you ensure that your team stays ahead of technological advancements and adapts quickly to changes in the space domain?
When we look at the air, sea, and land domains we currently operate in, the key is our rich digital environment and our ability to effectively train pilots, mission operators, and maintenance technicians by immersing them in their environment and providing the right human-machine interface for the intended training outcome. We also bring full training curricula, courseware, and analytics that prepare for and build on the individual’s in-situ device experiences. It's all about the science of human learning.
Again, the critical element here is what the digital environment includes – platforms, weather, people moving on the ground possibly driven by AI agents, terrain, buildings, essentially all the critical things that make the operational world, how they move, how they respond, and how they collaborate.
When we extend that to space applications, there's very little difference. Even a space asset is still required to exist in a digital environment for training and mission readiness purposes. Training ground station operators for a launch event, orbital maneuvers, space junk avoidance, mission operations, and even cyber-attack responses can be practiced through the same tech stack that CAE has in place today.
There are unique assets the space domain requires for operational modeling purposes, but the CAE infrastructure is there. We don't view space application digital environmental needs as significantly different than the core markets we serve today.
One exception is that space applications, particularly where CAE plays in the digital transformation, are some of the most heavily networked, distributed, and secure infrastructures. CAE is actively engaged in deployed cyber-secure, hybrid cloud operations specifically focused on the highest level of information protection while still supporting distributed training. This technology is ready today to support space domain needs.
"There's fantastic synergy today in what CAE already does well for our customers and the unique needs of space."
During your panel discussion at the American Aerospace & Defense Summit, which innovative approaches or technologies are you most excited to speak about, with regard to their potential impact on space exploration and development?
As an individual who loves technology, I'm excited about so many things. It's hard to narrow it down to just a few.
CAE has a strong history in training, and we are well prepared for the challenges and opportunities the space frontier presents because of our digital environment's richness, ability to develop software quickly, cyber-secure foundation, hybrid cloud infrastructure, and world-class content creation team. On the hybrid cloud topic, we can drive unified, tailored training across distributed nodes, allowing someone on the East Coast, the Midwest, and the West Coast to each interface with role-specific training devices of varying fidelity yet collaboratively train the same mission together replicating what they will experience when the real event occurs.
Expanding, you might have a full-motion device somewhere simulating a space vehicle, interfacing with someone in a non-motion device wearing virtual reality (VR) goggles replicating their ground controller station, and a 3rd person sitting at a desktop performing the role of mission commander. We can connect them through secure means and practice a mission collaboratively.
Another exciting area for me in the realm of artificial intelligence is the ability to use trained agents to monitor in-situ student performance, potentially recommending deviations to their curriculum if the student regularly excels at a skill or has difficulty with a particular proficiency need. How they respond to stress, whether they are effective when a time-critical decision is required, and what their biometrics say correlates to learning and student throughput. We can also use these analytics to track safety metrics vs. the training standard or skill loss between training cycles.
It is a very exciting capability that applies whether I'm doing aircraft sensor operator training or at a ground station commanding a time-critical orbital maneuver.
"Space applications already reap the benefits of the existing CAE technology portfolio."
What are the top priorities for the engineering division at CAE in the coming years?
Hearing our customer's challenges, bringing beneficial technologies to bear, and delivering solutions on time that meet their needs, including faster time to market at improved affordability through product-focused development and reuse.
Deliberate, continuous improvement in the products we have already deployed. This includes improving how our machine learning applications perform, growing our content, and expanding our mixed reality training, regardless of whether you're training to become an A320 pilot or service the landing gear on a 777.
Human-machine teaming is also evolving in the marketplace. How does a pilot effectively interface and train with a collaborative unmanned platform? This is an example of something else that is high on the list of our technology enablers.
Ethical development and application of AI-driven technologies.
Finally, delivering training solutions to the warfighter that ensure safety and mission readiness for their operations anywhere, anytime. I can’t say it any simpler than that.
"That's what we're all about - safety and readiness."
We're excited to welcome Andy Windon as a speaker at the upcoming American Aerospace & Defense Summit taking place December 4-5, 2024, at the Renaissance Phoenix Glendale Hotel & Spa, AZ!
Discover more insights during his panel discussion titled “Bridging Digital Frontiers: Making Advancements and Overcoming Hurdles in Realizing the Potential of Digital Transformation” on Day 2 of the Summit.
Visit aadsummit.com to view the full program!
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