IT takes flight

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Every two years, Farnborough's airfield is host to some of the most cutting edge technology at work anywhere in the world. This year's show may have opened with a fly past from a plane that first flew in the 1950s – the Avro Vulcan XH558 – the rest of the exhibits are far more up to date.

Whether it is Boeing's wide-bodied 787 Dreamliner – almost half of which is made from composite materials – or Airbus' fly-by-wire passenger jets, the future of aviation is ranged along the runway.

But the airline industry, in particular, faces a challenge. It has to lower its costs, become more efficient, and cut its emissions. Even more, it needs to do something to restore the attraction of air travel, which has suffered from industrial action, terrorism, the recession and most recently, volcanic ash.

One way plane makers and airlines hope to do this, is through computers. This year, HP was one of Farnborough's sponsors, and several of the large IT integrators had a strong presence. In a market where a passenger jet costs hundreds of millions of pounds – Airbus' flagship A380 costs a cool US$320m, improvements made through IT represent a relatively cheap investment.

Areas where IT is already helping airlines range from the relatively simple or mundane, such as RFID tags on life jackets and self-service check passenger check in, to the highly complex flight planning systems that regulators hope will reduce aircraft emissions, as well as make better use of increasingly congested air corridors and airports.

Programmes such as Single European Sky and Cleansky will rely heavily on IT on the ground to meet their goals. But the most interesting applications for IT could be in the aircraft themselves.

Despite – or maybe because – they are surrounded by hi tech elsewhere, airlines have been quite slow at adopting IT to improve their business processes. How many times have you seen a cabin services manager/director tick passengers' names off a dot-matrix print out? Why isn't that being done on an iPad, or even an old Windows CE PDA?

One reason is that airlines, and airport operators, depend heavily on rather old IT systems, including mainframes and proprietary versions of Unix. Another is that anything that goes into a plane has to be tested to very, very rigorous standards.

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