You always have your finger on the pulse, don’t you? 
The airline industry, from regulators to manufactures, airlines, airports, aircraft maintainer, ATC and so on, needs so much actual and historical data.
They need the cloud for many use cases. From resilient immutable archiving of aircraft data to highly available customer/passenger or baggage data that must be available anywhere in the world.
Airlines create huge history databases for modeling their future supply of flights and manage their yields. And every single actual flight creates hundreds if not thousands of Megabytes from IOT data from aircraft sensors.
Maybe Storj DCS could be an interesting offer for that industry in a way how all these different data could be stored and be available at the same time.
And very much a world wide (or at least very geographically dispersed) data access footprint as well…
I doubt that such companies would consider Storj. Maybe EM’s rocket company would, because he/they are more open minded.
If You don’t ask, You never know.
As a CEO of some Ryanair or other budget sensitive airlines, i would love if someone come, and finger point me: here, here, and here You can save that much thanks to us, Storj, and we will take care of everything related.
And don’t forget the green effect.
The list of speakers is high ranking
Only some:
Dirk John, Chief Information and Digital Officer, British Airways
Thomas RĂĽckert, SVP & CIO, Lufthansa Group
Amelia Deluca, Chief Sustainability Officer, Delta Air Lines
Rathi Murthy, CTO and President, Expedia Group
Isabelle Droll, CIO Airline, Hotels & Resorts, Corporate and Sustainability, TUI
Xavier Lagardere, Managing Director - Lufthansa Innovation Hub, Chief Data Officer & VP Innovation, Lufthansa Group
Maurice Jenkins, Chief Innovation Officer, Miami International Airport
John Hurley, Chief Technology Officer, Ryanair Limited
Steve Armitage, Head of Design & Innovation, Heathrow
Kunaal Abhijit Masih, Head of Digital Transformation, Cathay Pacific Airways
Daniel Engberg, Head Of Ai and It Strategy, SAS Scandinavian Airlines
Tino Klähne, Director Strategic Innovation & Intelligence, Lufthansa Innovation Hub
Christian Haude, Senior Data Strategy & Innovation Manager, Lufthansa Group
Jiwoong Kim, Manager, IT Strategy, Korean Air
Ivan Terekhov, Director of Research & Intelligence, Lufthansa Innovation Hub
Raza Ali, Vice President - Innovation, IAG
And look who is also there:
Julie Shainock, Global Leader Travel and Transportation Industry, Microsoft
Quantum Metric/Google Cloud
Nordcloud
If I wanted to present Storj to an audience of the aviation industry, I would book a booth there and/or become a sponsor: your enquiry | World Aviation Festival 2024
They even have a exclusive zone for start-ups to come in contact with the right people of the aviation industry. However Storj would no longer qualify as start-up: Start-up Village
I agree that these companies will tend to be risk averse. And that’s a good thing because first of all their mountains of data are monetary valuable and of course at least parts of it relevant for safety and security.
Imagine a company like Lufthansa would lose access permanently to the maintenance data of their fleet. Or training of their cockpit personnel. So yes that would be stored in safe and secured places like their own data centers.
On the other hand, because they are starting storing everything in the cloud, they need solutions.
And again I am not saying store your most sensitive data. And store them only on Storj.
It is a process. Make them aware of Storj. Give them free test rides. Discuss their needs. Present over and over on events where they are. Invite them to more free testing.
And so on and so on. And of course maybe not start with Lufthansa or BA. But with smaller regional ones that need cheaper cloud solutions.
And if you get to talk to them on such events, you could also learn what your product is missing to be attractive for them.
Just to repeat: Airlines are sitting on a mountain of actual and historical data: Personnel, Training, Aircraft, Airports, Revenue, past utilization, customer data and so on and so on and so on…
Edit: And they are not just sitting on that mountain of data, they are struggling with redundancy, worldwide availability, disaster safety and have probably backups over backups worldwide in different locations like mountains
I see they even offer S3 now. Maybe interesting for Storj to partner with them: MOUNT10 – MOUNT10 S3 Object Storage
Lufthansa even has its own cloud offering for other airlines:
Perhaps makes sense. Just imagine if someone would control your cloud except you? Planes would fail or fly to the paths they shouldn’t?
But also I think they uses compute too.
This is closer to a set of tools specific to airlines (like, for scheduling, tracking costs, etc.) than just an IT cloud: | Lufthansa Systems. Besides, it’s built on top of Azure.
They surely need more than just storage. But of course storage too for example for backing up. United seems to go with AWS. Here is something that I have found.
The logo at 1.09. Looks almost like…
This is what an AI-Bot had to say when I asked about data storage capacity requirements for Lufthansa and United Airlines. Of course no guarantee that anything of that is for real:
Lufthansa’s IT infrastructure is likely to be complex and diverse, with various systems and storage solutions in place to support their operations, customer services, and other business functions.
I can provide some context on the scale of data storage in the aviation industry. Airlines like Lufthansa generate and process vast amounts of data from various sources, including:
- Flight operations: sensor data from aircraft, flight plans, and navigation systems.
- Customer data: passenger information, booking systems, and loyalty programs.
- Maintenance and repair: maintenance records, repair history, and parts inventory.
- Safety and security: surveillance footage, access control systems, and security protocols.
To give you an idea of the scale, here are some rough estimates:
- A single commercial airliner can generate up to 500 GB of data per flight.
- The aviation industry as a whole is expected to generate around 98 million terabytes (or approximately 98,000 petabytes) of data by 2026.
While I couldn’t find Lufthansa’s exact storage capacity, it’s likely to be in the range of tens to hundreds of petabytes, considering the company’s size, operations, and data requirements. However, this is purely speculative, and the actual storage capacity might be higher or lower.
According to a 2020 article by Datanami, United Airlines stores around 1 exabyte (1,000 petabytes) of data. This massive amount of data comes from various sources, including:
Flight operations: sensor data from aircraft, flight plans, and navigation systems.
Customer data: passenger information, booking systems, and loyalty programs.
Maintenance and repair: maintenance records, repair history, and parts inventory.
Safety and security: surveillance footage, access control systems, and security protocols.
To put this into perspective, 1 exabyte is equivalent to:1 billion gigabytes (GB)
1 trillion megabytes (MB)
1 quadrillion kilobytes (KB)United Airlines’ 1 exabyte of data is likely stored across various systems, including on-premises data centers, cloud storage, and edge computing infrastructure. The airline uses this data to improve operational efficiency, enhance customer experiences, and ensure safety and security.
Keep in mind that this figure might have changed since 2020, as data volumes continue to grow in the aviation industry. However, 1 exabyte provides a rough estimate of the massive scale of data storage required by a major airline like United Airlines.
If they would store just a small bit of that amount as additional backup on Storj it would be massive.
I don’t trust a thing those LLMs spew out 
And I think that’s the right thing to do. However the answers can give a nice overview over a topic or some info you had not thought of. And therefore it can be a starting point for doing some own research.
I recently came across that link from DuckDuckGo-AI chat that claims to be more anonymous and thought it would be fun to try it and see what it has to say on that topic.
By the way, we have several companies, who uses Storj to store/use data for AI.
I work for an Air Navigation Service Provider in Europe as an ATSEP in IT-network.
Basically there are two different kinds of data:
-
CNS (Communication, Navigation, Surveillance) Although this data is mostly self created and processed by internal systems for our own use, there is some data that will be shared with other air navigation service providers like surveillance data.
Mostly all the data of CNS needs to be saved for at least 30 days or even longer in case an incident was reported. -
Imported data such as Surveillance data, flight plan data…
Pretty much all the ANSPs / Airlines in Europe share their information via the PENS network. This network was created and is maintained by EUROCONTROL. Due to the fact that different ANSPs use different clouds the data integration is not easy at all… therefore an upcoming platform called SWIM takes place.
In short SWIM will act like a management platform for standards, governance and infrastructure for data exchange in the future.
Maybe is it worth it to get an eye on SWIM