Issue 37 Unmanned Systems Technology April/May 2021 Einride next-gen Pod l Battery technology l Dive Technologies AUV-Kit l UGVs insight l Vanguard EFI/ETC vee twins l Icarus Swarms l Transponders l Sonobot 5 l IDEX 2021 report

20 In conversation | Dr Arnaud Coville CRJ700. However, after my first child was born I became uneasy about the purpose of the systems I was helping to develop,” he notes. In around 2000 therefore, Dr Coville switched to developing civil products. He also wanted to move back to Germany, wanting his children to go through the German school system that had impressed him so much in his youth. He therefore applied for a job with German-American aviation conglomerate Fairchild Dornier, in Bavaria. “I’d known the company’s 728 jet airliner project was in development,” he recalls. “I was hired, and joined the flight control system group, where I was responsible for all the cockpit control architecture, including the engine controls and crew-alerting system,” he says. Throughout this experience, Dr Coville gained an insight into many of the technical challenges and problems with aircraft development, including flutter, aero elastics and flight control stability. “I also gained a greater understanding of the certification processes at the aircraft level, and how a large project for developing a full-sized aircraft should be managed. I learned a lot from my boss Jens Nielsen at the time, who was managing the flight control and avionics, and he really helped me develop my management skills during that time.” In late 2002, Dr Coville was hired by Diehl Aerosystems as project manager in charge of developing a system of integrated modular avionics (IMA) for the Airbus A380. “Before the IMA concept, each aircraft system had its own hardware, operating system, power supply and so on,” he explains. “The idea of IMA was to provide a single platform combining that hardware, operating system and the rest, which would support multiple aircraft systems at once. “The A380 had separate ventilation, steering, braking, fuel bleed air, air conditioning and pressure systems, but by standardising their hardware and operating systems, we were able to reduce the overall weight of the aircraft. “Also, DO-297 and many other aviation regulations did not exist yet, so I had to develop the ability to define solutions in parallel to finding a way with the regulator to define the rules we needed to apply.” Tenure at Airbus Although Dr Coville’s time at Diehl was valuable, the required commute from the heartland of southern Germany to his offices at Uberlingen on the Swiss border meant that for two years he saw his family largely only at weekends. Joining Airbus Helicopters remedied that in January 2005, by allowing him to relocate to the much nearer town of Donauworth, and for the next 15 years he served as programme manager for several projects at the European aerospace giant. For example, he worked on the EC135 P3T3 helicopter (now called the H135 T3/P3) and supported the development of its integrated modular avionics system. “In the EC135 project, I was responsible for its whole development at the programme level, including defining the product policy, organising the budget and setting development priorities to ensure that the helicopter developed in pace with the market,” he explains. “A lot of alignment between these activities was needed, which included establishing interfaces with different departments. Despite these challenges though, we repositioned the EC135 at the top of its market before the Bell 429 could gain momentum.” He recalls that another interesting experience at Airbus was his involvement in developing helicopter medical rescue services in China. “While I wasn’t responsible for developing the complete HEMS [Helicopter Emergency Medical Services] system, I helped with contracting and installing the production line for the H135 helicopters supplied for it there,” he says. “At the time, thousands of people were dying every year, solely because fast aerial April/May 2021 | Unmanned Systems Technology Although Dr Coville gained his PhD in Paris, he has worked for most of his life for German aerospace firms, and now heads Volocopter’s r&d from its offices in Bruchsal