BlockchainAIR prototype: what we did, very shortly

What was the event about?

Swiss Legal Tech Hackathon took place in Zurich on 3–4 October in pair with Legal Tech Conference. Developers coded a prototype in teams with lawyers for ideas the latter made up based on their legal background. 12 legal engineers who are experts both in coding and law helped the teams or worked alone. Me and my friend Gregory, who is developer, came from Moscow as a team from the beginning. For now, we haven’t had legal tech hackathons in Russia, the first one is planned in November.

What was our idea?

90% of aircraft documentation is still prepared in paper form and signed by hand totalling in 50–60 boxes of paper for each plane. When aircraft is being delivered to another operator all boxes have to be reviewed one by one. As result, documents are often lost during repair work, check or delivery itself. That leads to legal incompliance with international and local aviation rules.

The blockchain-based solution is able to solve the problem. The chain of blocks stores the encrypted aircraft documents, and once saved, the data is recorded forever. The core benefits of implementing blockchain here are the following:

• Aircraft records can’t be altered retroactively, for example, during accident investigation (immutability)
  Access to the system is secured by cryptographical methods with private and public keys (cryptographical signature)
  Documents can’t be lost because each user has a full copy of the database (distributed ledger).
  Without blockchain, current digital products in this field fail to guarantee immutability of records and complete storage security.
  So, during the flight to Zurich we decided to make a prototype of IT platform that enables responsible person of airline, lessor and aviation authority with private key, to supervise or modify aircraft history managed by Ethereum (Solidity) smart contract.

What was the result?

We won the 3rd place and the visit to PwC Digital Centre to pitch our idea. Planned on January 2018. We called the project ‘BlockchainAir’ (http://swiss.easylaw.tech).

What will we do then?

We have already started to transform the idea to startup. I have one under my belt (EasyLaw.tech: automating lawyers’ routine), so that experience will help. By the way, I worked as aircraft lease lawyer in Transaero Airlines for three years, that’s why I think we put ourselves into aviation. We are now communicating with Russian and international airlines to discuss aspects of aircraft records management in depth and want to visit IATA 4th Paperless Aircraft Operations Conference in Montreal in November. The topic is very in line with us and the event must be extremely helpful.

Everyone who would like to support us, would be in such a needy time:
my Ethereum-wallet: 0x045db0e6ee66ddab44db204a98fd06fe457fb558
my Bitcoin-wallet: 1CGKpkdPHedHincC45X4JYw6jdDuGqDWFJ
I will be happy to discuss any questions, my LinkedIn profile: www.linkedin.com/in/andreydidenko.
Let’s make commercial aviation safer!