SITA launches 'Aviation Blockchain Sandbox' international research project

SITA launched (27-Jun-2018) an aviation industry research project to explore the potential of blockchain and invited more than 100 IT executives from air transport organisations to join the company's 'Aviation Blockchain Sandbox'. SITA stated it is investing in the infrastructure to accelerate industry-specific research into the viability of running multi-enterprise apps using the blockchain distributed ledger technology. The project will be led and managed by the SITA Lab technology research team, and will develop in three stages.

• Stage 1: SITA will open the FlightChain project to airlines and airports in Sep-2018. FlightChain was SITA's blockchain trial, involving British Airways, London Heathrow, Geneva Airport and Miami International Airport using smart contracts for shared control of data. FlightChain stored flight information on the blockchain to provide a single source of truth. SITA will allow other airlines and airports to join this research and test FlightChain for their own use;
• Stage 2: SITA will work with organisations that wish to test smart contracts across a number of airline and airport operational use cases;
• Stage 3: SITA will enable participants to run their own node, with work expected to start in late 2018. This will give the organisations the opportunity to become more involved and to participate in the running of the network, including becoming custodians. [more - original PR]