Daher General Aviathon Hackathon Winners Named

Aircraft manufacturer Daher announced the three winning concepts from its first general aviation hackathon this week. According to the company, the “General Aviathon” challenged participants to develop flight safety-related solutions for Daher’s TBM turboprop family on two themes: “advanced features and capabilities to make the aircraft more connected, intelligent and autonomous; and innovative solutions to further refine the experience of piloting and using the TBM.” The winners were selected from a pool of 25 participating teams from the U.S., China, India and Mexico.

The winning concepts were the Aviation Voice Recognition System (AVRS), TBM Monitoring Pilot and Avia-X. AVRS, submitted by engineers Adam Kaplan and Ben Krosner, is a software solution that would be “capable of parsing and understanding instructions from air traffic controllers to make changes in the aircraft’s flight profile (such as climbing, descending and turning), which would be implemented subject to the pilot’s approval.” Proposed by TBM owners Vijay and Meera Singh, TBM Monitoring Pilot provides “verbal guidance based on images processed from cockpit cameras to assist the pilot in flying the aircraft.” Avia-X was submitted by University of California–Berkeley students Alan He, Frank Ge, Gary Yang and Ken Guan. It is designed to “enhance the on-board environment with pre-set themes and emotion recognition for light and music, potentially expanding to include an olfactive experience.”

“We are extremely satisfied by the range and scope of ideas proposed in the General Aviathon, which came from individuals, students, startups and established companies,” said Daher CEO Didier Kayat. “This year’s competition clearly demonstrated how novel ideas from outside the traditional aviation sectors can be proposed to modernize procedures, improve safety and increase comfort in the general aviation sector.” Each winner received a $5,000 cash prize. Daher says it will potentially partner with the winning teams to further to develop and deploy their concepts.