The success of data services, such as the General Motors automotive OnStar system, suggests that some hardware manufacturers will eventually make most of their revenue not from the painstaking process of designing and manufacturing physical products but from selling data to owners of their hardware. In aviation, this trend is firmly evident in Rockwell Collins’s purchase of flight handling company Air Routing in January. And especially so with the announcement of the new Rockwell Collins Ascend Flight Information Solutions products.
Ascend is the first big product resulting from the Air Routing acquisition and also marks the retirement of the Air Routing brand name. Henceforth, the Houston-based flight planning, handling and information services division is known as Flight Information Solutions. A simple way of thinking of Ascend is that it is a content-management system for aircraft, consolidating and accumulating all the data needed to accomplish missions and sharing data generated by each flight.
