The Naval Air Systems Command, the provisioner of material support for aircraft flown by the United States Navy known as NAVAIR, announced Thursday that it has started an experimental pilot using distributed ledger blockchain technology to track aviation components through the parts life cycle.

To launch the pilot blockchain, NAVAIR partnered with Indiana Technology and Manufacturing Cos., the developers of Simba Chain. Simba Chain is a product of an Army-led Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency project for tracking secure messages using blockchain technology.

The Navy will use this technology to secure information about the aircraft parts and the supply chain involved by using the tamperproof capabilities of the blockchain and inherent security. Rapidly determining the origin and lineage of flight-critical aircraft parts is an extremely important part of the maintenance life cycle of aircraft and airborne systems.

But it’s a resource-consuming process that drives up the cost to operate military aircraft. Currently, the U.S. Navy tracks the movement and history of parts using pen and paper on a piece of paperwork called a Scheduled Removal Component Card, which is then manually entered into a database.

Using Simba Chain, NAVAIR hopes to automate parts of this process by using what is known as a secure permissioned blockchain, which is a privately hosted and secured blockchain system housed within a controlled network and access is managed by security roles.

George Blackwood, logistics management specialist with the North Island Fleet Support Team, said he expects this blockchain system will help “improve visibility, anti-tampering, traceability and data transparency in the NAVAIR supply chain.”

The Feet Support Team believes that by automating and securing each action done to any part in the supply chain will help reduce costs. That’s because it will become possible to ascertain at a glance the history of a part by pulling up an auditable transaction trail. That trail is automatically updated each time a part changes hands, sits on a shelf, gets repaired, gets installed or removed.

One major hurdle that the Navy needs to overcome using such as system is moving away from a centralized database where all of the information on parts is stored. Because blockchains are distributed, there is no single system that it runs on that will be secured and accredited with information validity assurance.

Providing a method of authenticating that information in a blockchain is valid and not tampered with is a fundamental function of blockchain systems. It will be part of ITAMCO’s mission in this partnership to provide a working prototype that shows how such an auditable lineage trail for parts will work and what it will look like, including high-security aspects.

The Navy already has a trusted network to run the permissioned blockchain on, and although it will loosely resemble a public blockchain – such as runs bitcoin or Ethereum – it will use less computing power in its “proof of work” consensus system to make the chain tamperproof. Because the Simba Chain permissioned blockchain will use less computing power, thus cost less to power, its overall integrity will be a potential challenge that NAVAIR and ITAMCO must overcome.

Supply chain tracking efficiency is a common need that blockchains are well-positioned to help resolve. That’s especially so because blockchains act to secure a timeline of transactions in a way that can be audited and trusted after the fact without the need to trust the ledger itself.

As a result, numerous industries have launched pilots for blockchain-based supply chain management systems, some with critical security needs in mind. For example, IBM Corp. and Wal-Mart Stores Inc. launched a global supply chain for food safety tracking in conjunction with numerous retailers, distributors and producers. This year, IBM and A.P. Moller-Maersk Group launched TradeLens, a shipping blockchain for supply chain tracking while Microsoft Corp. and Adents International partnered up on Adents Novatrack, a product tracking blockchain.

Other industries that have explored blockchain supply chain solutions include the diamond industry’s De Beers, mineral exchange company Open Mineral and freight transport company FedEx Corp.

The U.S. Navy has highly specialized security and confidentiality needs, but the underlying functions remain the same: Blockchain provides a point of trust to track the origin, movements and actions related during its life cycle.

Ultimately, the various groups collaborating on the blockchain – NAVAIR, ITAMCO, the Fleet Readiness Center and others — will work together to architect a system that will meet these demands and test how such a distributed system could be put to use.

Photo: ITAMCO