GE Aviation’s digital solutions business is combining its data and analytics domain expertise with the scale of Microsoft’s Azure cloud service to speed up digitization in aerospace, the two companies announced on Tuesday at the Farnborough Airshow.

“Microsoft’s cloud, with its strong enterprise capability, including global reach, scale and security were all important in our decision to partner with them,” said GE Aviation chief digital officer John Mansfield.

Azure will allow GE Aviation (Chalet P2) to speed up its worldwide deployment of existing products, as well as offer new analytic workbench capabilities. In fact, Microsoft’s cloud is allowing GE Aviation to expand its collaboration with Emirates Airline to include predictive maintenance and diagnostics. The effort uses the emerging digital capabilities, such as artificial intelligence, coupled with airlines’ real-world operations experience, to make better use of resources and automate operations.

Honda Engine Work

Also at the Farnborough Airshow GA announced its GE Additive division has been selected by the Honda Engine R&D Center to help determine how additive manufacturing could help the Japanese company. The two companies developed the GE Honda HF120 engine that powers the HondaJet business aircraft.

Meanwhile GE Aviation said it had won a contract for avionics systems on the Boeing AH-64 Apache attach helicopter, including delivery of the pylon interface ubit, with deliveries taking place through to December 2018.

The company also announced that it would become an exclusive provider of Terradata's high-performance "analytics in the cloud" for airlines. An example of an application is GE's FlightPulse, which "automatically merges complex aircraft data with crew schedules, allowing commercial pilots to...conduct their own analysis and peer comparisons," discovering areas "to optimize operations and efficiency, while reducing risk, fuel consumption and carbon emissions." At a management level it allows "enterprise-level insights," said GE.

Finally, GE Aviation has signed an agreement with South Korea's Kookmin University for continued work on the validation of unmanned systems. Kookmin University established the Defense UAS Research & Development Center in April this year.