Aura Aero: Building the Aircraft of Tomorrow

00:00 I'm Marc Germain. I'm the Chief Digital Officer from Aura Aero. We have a small aircraft, a two-seater aircraft named Integral. We have three versions of this aircraft. the Integral R, for "race", the Integral S, for "school", and the Integral E, for "electrical". Integral is a training and aerobatic aircraft and the R is more oriented for aerobatics. And the S is more oriented on training and the E is a fully electrical aircraft. And we are very proud to have certified our first aircraft,

00:33 Integral R in a fully digital way. So no paper anymore. I mentioned Integral aircraft, but we are also developing another one, which is ERA, a regional commuter aircraft, a 19-seater hybrid electric propulsion and hybrid aircraft. And we are also developing a drone. What we want to prove and to show is that we are developing aircraft. It's our main business, but we have integrated digital within the DNA of the company.

01:04 So, it helps us to be more efficient. First, we are cloud native and we have zero on-premise computers. And we are using AWS and Google Cloud platform for the cloud parts and regarding the software, we are using Onshape for the CAD data, Arena for the PLM, and other software for the requirements management. We are very proud to work with Onshape. We have started to work with Onshape five years ago, and for us it is the first SaaS CAD solution with integrated PDM,

01:37 which is a dream for us. Our engineers are able to collaborate very easily thanks to just a Chromebook or a MacBook Air. We can exchange information very quickly. We can work remotely. We can work from everywhere in the world in addition to that, we have a lot of discussion with the PTC team and the Onshape team in order to update software. And, they listen to us, they add new features every three weeks. It's a real pleasure to work with that. Integration is very important for us. That's why we have developed a data platform

02:08 which is able to connect all these solutions between themselves and to synchronize data, to share data between all the solutions we have. We want to achieve what we have in mind from the start. It's to have a real digital twin of all our aircraft. By digital twin, I mean a simulation model for each aircraft, for each specific aircraft, which will help us to provide some very quick simulation, which helps to provide added value services to our customer.

02:39 Because if I know which simulation model to simulate very quickly I'd be able to provide to the customer very good information, very quickly. So predictive maintenance, optimize the aircraft, flight after flight, single pilot operation, which is roughly a kind of auto-pilot in case of emergency, this kind of services, we can achieve that thanks to the digital twin and the digital twin needs data. And data, we need to collect all the data and use it to train models.

03:10 And thanks to these models, we are coding the digital brain. We want to create these services for our customer and serving our customer. it's very important to demonstrate step after step that you can do the stuff you promise. So it's what we did. We make a first flight and we make a first certification. We sell the first aircraft. We did the first electrical aircraft flight in December. And in the same time we are building some digital deliverable at the same time. Even if it's not as visible as the rest, it will come.

03:42 And we have some interesting software and data coming in the back as a deliverable, too. We need to be smart because we want to produce aircraft not in a complex way. We want to be straightforward. So the digital is a way of achieving this goal. And we are building a strong foundation, a digital foundation to exchange data between the different business activities around the aircraft. We want people from design, from manufacturing,

04:14 from support, from sales, after sales working together. And that's the way we have built and we are continuously building the digital foundation of Aura Aero. In fact, we are growing because we are delivering, the most important part is to deliver aircraft, to prove to our shareholder that we are doing what we have promised.