Rolls-Royce Flight Checklist Ecosystem

Rolls-Royce test pilots fly a wide range of aircraft. The pilots are required to carry out detailed flight checks, and plan fly-past manoeuvres that are accurate to the second. Historically, laminated cards served as a manual flight checklist, and the timing of a flypast relied upon sight of 'way-points', when visible, and maps. To digitise this process, in 2013, the Rolls-Royce Director of Flight Operations, Phill O’Dell, commissioned Compsoft to build the Flight Checklist App. The Flight Checklist ecosystem has evolved year on year since its inception. In November 2021, the app proved instrumental when Rolls-Royce and Electroflight broke the world air speed record for electric aircraft.

There were three key challenges Rolls-Royce needed to resolve with the app:

• Digitising the checklists in a way that they could be; controlled from a CMS, and rendered on an iPad in a way that would be highly readable in an aircraft cockpit
• Allowing the remote control of the app from a wearable for when the iPad would be mounted out of reach
• Integration of a wearable device with customisable haptic timers intense enough to be sensed when flying a range of aircraft with varying levels of vibration within the cockpit

Compsoft Creative developed a custom Apple Watch app as part of the checklist app, which allowed the setting, and control of various timers. The watch app also included Apple Complications to display time sensitive information on the standard Apple Watch faces. Compsoft Creative extended the functionality of the watch app to allow remote control of the iPad app from the watch using simple gesture controls. This allowed pilots to control the app if it happened to be mounted on a device which was not immediately in reach.

The app included a number of timers, and used the haptics in Apple Watch to notify when these timers had expired. However, the haptics provided by the Apple Watch were not intense enough to always be felt in an environment where there was potentially extreme vibration and noise. To resolve this, Compsoft Creative sourced a wearable device and developed a custom smart strap, in partnership with Bremont watch makers. This wearable included motion control used to inform the app when it was on the pilot's wrist, and included a powerful haptic engine. Compsoft Creative extended the app to pair via BLE to the custom wearable, and send it custom commands based on the timers set-up by the pilot. The app’s UX was also updated to visually notify the pilot which timer was alerting using simple, customisable colour coded banner alerts, which showed and dismissed automatically. 

Watch our video of Daniel, our MD, and Dave, one of our Senior Developers, chatting about the challenges faced, and the innovative solutions identified in adding the Wearable element of the Rolls-Royce Flight Checklist ecosystem.