Program 

Cabin 4.0

Have all passengers fastened their seat belts? All tables are folded up, all overhead compartments closed? Does the oven work properly? These procedures are daily business for the cabin crew and necessary routine on every flight – but impersonal and complex.

Time is lost that could be better devoted to the passengers on board. With our visions for the cabin of the future, we want to achieve exactly that: Our "Cabin 4.0" links the aircraft cabin with integrated digital products and services. Real-time data exchange ensures that processes and functions in the cabin are automatically monitored and designed more effectively. In the cabin as we imagine it, the flight attendants only pay attention to the passengers! Also catering staff, maintenance crews and cleaning teams benefit from the networked cooperation. 

The "main actor" in the vision of the "Cabin 4.0" research project funded by the Federal Ministry of Economics and Energy (BMWI) will initially appear inconspicuous. It will be small and black hidden behind ceiling or wall coverings. But we are particularly proud of him – after all, we thought of him in cooperation with the entire Lufthansa Group. A single access point, which receives, bundles and processes cabin data, will make the work of mechanics, flight attendants or caterers much easier. The small box forms the central communication point in the cabin with which all devices – from the oven in the galley to the luggage rack and the reading lamp – are connected. This is our vision of data architecture in the cabin. 

It is not new that devices in the aircraft display their faults or send their error messages. However, with increasing networking and cloud intelligence, new possibilities for processing and interpreting error messages are emerging. For example, an oven in the kitchen can now send parameters to a maintenance crew on the ground, telling them that the oven is likely to break down within the next few hours of operation. This prevents the unit from breaking down during operation because it can be replaced before this happens. For this to work, communication from machine to machine is necessary. The components communicate with each other via wireless sensor networks and data buses and transmit the data to a central communication point. All major aerospace companies are currently working on making wireless communication of devices on board aircraft ready for series production. Lufthansa Technik, too, has various initiatives and research projects working in this direction. 

When new technologies are introduced, we are involved in the preparations – always with an eye on possible applications in our aviation industry. For the connected cabin of the future, everything revolves around WAIC, the future standard for Wireless Avionics Intra-Communications. Our vision is a WAIC standard as open source, a technology on which everything that is networked in the cabin and is not relevant to flight safety can be synchronized. These include seats, kitchen appliances and much more. We're at the forefront. While politics and industry are currently developing a standard that ensures flight safety through frequency spacing and shielding on board, we are the first company in the world to build a circuit board for a WAIC access point. This is how we turn a standard for flight safety into a new benchmark for flight comfort. The cabin becomes a "smart home". 

Especially during boarding and preparation for landing, the flight attendants are under a lot of strain: they have to check the correct closure of the overhead compartments, the sunshields, the seat belts of each individual passenger as well as the position of the seat manually in the shortest possible time. We think: If our modern cars signal that a trunk or door is not locked or a seat belt is not fastened correctly, then this must also work in the aircraft. Various subprojects of Cabin 4.0 are therefore concerned with intelligent automation of cabin checks. This saves cabin crew valuable time, which they can use for direct passenger service.

The mechanics also have to deal with many recurring processes in the technical support of the cabin, which could be carried out more quickly by intelligent automatic processes. We ask ourselves: Would it perhaps even be possible for the cabin to check itself and report defects automatically to the mechanics? All products in the cabin, such as seats, luggage compartments and lighting are already equipped with sensors. With the help of image recognition, optical defects could be detected and transferred to digital job cards. The knowledge gained from this remains in the form of a learning curve for any findings that may occur later. Optimal workflows using artificial intelligence and augmented reality are a realistic future for us. Why shouldn't the maintenance crew get a first virtual overview of the condition of the cabin with small drones in the run-up to a check? Our vision for the "Self-checking Cabin" starts at many different places.

When the LED reading light becomes a beamer: The smart use of existing energy sources, i.e. the tapping of local energy surplus, is one way to satisfy the ever-increasing hunger for data in the cabin. Optical data transmission over short distances by light, the Li-Fi – short for Light Fidelity, is a promising approach. The LED lamp transmits data due to rapid changes in brightness that are imperceptible to the human eye. These light pulses are captured and converted into electrical signals. This makes it possible, for example, to stream films from the in-flight entertainment program directly to a receiver, e.g. the screen in the passenger seat.