Calvin Prof Works on Airplane Communications

December 5, 2003 == FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

The prospect of airplanes relying on internet technology to stay up in the air
might scare some people. After all in an age of viruses, e-mail spam and
computer crashes the internet isn't likely at the top of society's reliability
list.

But Calvin engineering professor Steve VanderLeest says, despite people's
first impressions, internet technology will soon be the primary way of keeping
planes aloft. And, he says, the technology will be more reliable than current
methods and cheaper. He's quick to add, however, that despite the terminology,
there will be some critical differences in the technology currently used to
communicate on the internet and the technology slated to become a standard part
of new planes.

"Right now," he says, "avionics are incredibly expensive and complicated. The
airplane manufacturers - people like Boeing - are looking to cut costs and
simplify. They're responding to the marching orders of commercial airlines,
but also responding to what they're hearing from the military."

VanderLeest says the most promising way to cut costs and simplify is TCP/IP.
TCP is Transport Control Protocol and IP is Internet Protocol. Both acronyms
refer to the way information currently flows across the internet. And both
methods have huge pluses for the complex systems of communication contained in
modern-day aircraft.

For the last two years VanderLeest has been working as a consultant to Smiths
Aerospace, looking at putting internet protocols into aircraft communications
systems. What he's learned, he says, is encouraging.

"TCP and IP," he says, "has been around since the early 1980s and became the
internet in the late 80s. They've been around long enough to have inspired
other uses. And one of those other uses is to allow the multitude of
communication systems in an aircraft to talk to each other. What we're seeing
now is that the internet protocols make for reliable communication at much
lower cost
than customized approaches. They will have a big impact on airplanes."

VanderLeest says it's important to remember too that the communication network
for the flight management and navigation equipment is isolated, so that while
the protocol is the same as the Internet, dangers such as viruses and spam
cannot occur on the network of the airplane. "That's why," he says, "people
don't need to worry when they hear the words internet and airplane mentioned in
the same sentence."

A Calvin graduate who earned his Ph.D. at the University of Illinois,
VanderLeest began working with Smiths as part of a sabbatical project and has
continued to work with the companies during summers. As an electrical and
computer engineer he says his current work is paying dividends for both him and
his students.

"I see problems (at Smiths) that I wouldn't necessarily anticipate if I were
only looking at issues theoretically," he says. "I also see in the workplace
the dependencies and interactions between different issues and problems and how
things impact and rely on each other. That's actually kind of a nice reminder
of what we're trying to do at Calvin with a liberal arts education - where
we're teaching students about dependencies and interactions in different
disciplines."

And, says VanderLeest, there is one final benefit.

"Students," he says, "pay a little closer attention when I use examples from
my work. A major company is employing me for my expertise. That gives me some
credibility."

He adds, with a smile: "Maybe even more than a Ph.D. does."

Contact Steve at 616-526-6559 or svleest@calvin.edu

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Received on Fri Dec 5 10:10:26 2003