Waterloo's Quiet Rise as an Aerospace Innovation Hub

Tackling aviation’s three biggest threats

Kearns started WISA with a question: What are the biggest threats facing the future viability of aviation? The answers to that question were quickly apparent.

Aviation today is facing three critical challenges: a workforce shortage, a growing hostility to aviation because of its real (and perceived) environmental impacts and the fast evolution of technology across the industry. As a result, WISA organizes these challenges around the three pillars of sustainability: social, environmental, and economic. Kearns points out that the institute’s logo has three pillars holding up aviation.

“Since we’ve launched, our focus has been on catalysing research in those three pillars,” says Kearns. “In social, everything from pilot training and human factors to flight physiology and pilot mental health. In environmental, looking at things like solar panels on hangars and sustainable fuels. Lastly, for economic, it’s everything else—optimization, cybersecurity and other technologies that pose both opportunities and challenges for businesses.”

How WISA connects aviation companies with innovative ideas

For an aviation business with a research question, walking up to a university the size of Waterloo can be daunting. Who do you talk to? Where do you start? Which of the thousands of faculty, staff and students is working on something that connects to your problem?

That’s where WISA comes in. For businesses looking to plug into aerospace innovation, WISA isn’t just a research institute. It’s a shortcut.

“WISA can be a very effective bridge where we can help them navigate all the different stakeholders within the university system to help match them with research collaborators,” she says.

It’s not just helpful for large enterprises either. Kearns says WISA is making an impact for small to medium enterprises. The organization also has a strong grasp on available government support programs – grants and tax credits – that help companies access high-skill talent and deliver a strong return on their research investments.

Research is only part of the benefit of working with WISA and UWaterloo. The university’s world-renowned co-operative education program is placing talented students with leading aerospace companies across Canada and around the world.

“We love it when our partners hire our students, whether that’s co-op or research projects that support our masters and doctoral students. And those students, once they graduate, they’re often looking for employment and the companies who have been engaged with us throughout that cycle have a direct line to hire some really talented people to support their operations,” she says.

An airport, an electric plane and 300 test flights

Ask Kearns what makes Waterloo’s aerospace ecosystem different, and the conversation quickly turns to the Region of Waterloo International Airport (YKF).

“We at WISA like to think of our airport as a bit of a living lab,” she says. “We have lots of examples where we’ve worked with stakeholders at the airport to test and validate new technologies that are being experimented with or developed by researchers.”

The airport is where WISA’s research leaves the page and meets the runway and where the institute’s relationships with operators, flight schools and regulators come together in a way that’s hard to find anywhere else in Canada.

Before any vehicle can move from lab to air, it has to be rigorously tested and certified. Achieving certification can be a difficult process for businesses, but Kearns notes that the Waterloo Region aerospace ecosystem is unique because of the close alignment with the airport. One example is the Pipistrel Velis Electro, which WISA acquired and helped earn Transport Canada approval by collecting necessary data.

“We partnered with the Waterloo Wellington Flight Centre (WWFC) at the airport and we hired our students as pilots to fly the aircraft and collect data. They completed more than 300 flights to collect data that researchers at the university analyzed and sent to Transport Canada to show that that aircraft is viable,” Kearns says. “It’s a really good model of what’s possible when everybody works together.”

WWFC recently announced new scenic flights in the Velis, giving members of the public the opportunity to experience electric aviation firsthand and imagine a more sustainable future for the industry.

Waterloo is the aerospace hub hiding in plain sight

Aerospace innovation in Waterloo doesn’t happen in isolation. WISA works alongside other research institutes at the University of Waterloo in artificial intelligence, robotics, quantum computing, climate and more.

“The more talent that we can bring in to help us address the big challenges facing the future viability of aviation, the better off we are,” Kearns says.

That same collaborative instinct extends beyond campus. WISA partners with AeroWR, the regional body bringing together the Waterloo area’s aerospace and defence community, to make sure research makes its way into industries.

It also opens up opportunities in dual-use research, where the same innovation can serve both civilian and defence applications. Take human factors research, for example. The work WISA researchers are doing on eye-tracking and sensor-based learning to train pilots more effectively applies just as well to military aviation as it does to commercial flight schools.

“I don’t see it as being necessarily at odds,” Kearns says. “There’s a lot of insights that maybe haven’t previously been translated between civil to defence, and there’s a lot of interest in our community in that space.”

Ask Kearns what makes Waterloo’s aerospace ecosystem stand out and her answer is quick: innovation, collaboration and sustainability. And she has a vision for what comes next.

“My dream is that other people around the world will say ‘Waterloo’ and they’ll go, ‘oh, don’t you guys have an amazing aerospace innovation sector?’”