Innovation is at the Heart of Acron Aviation

This 31 March it was announced that L3Harris Commercial Aviation Solutions would be known as Acron Aviation (Acron) to reflect its new brand. This 8 April, the author interviewed Robin Glover-Faure, Vice President, Customer, at the rebranded business. The interview with Mr. Glover-Faure completed at the Acron booth during WATS 2025 is provided below.

CAT: Robin, thanks for taking time from your busy WATS schedule to meet with me. How will the rebranded Acron be different from the legacy L3Harris business?

Robin Glover-Faure (RGF): Our business and company were founded about 100 years ago – that’s how long we have been innovating in the pilot training space. We can trace our ownership and lineage to the very earliest days of simulation. Our goal as Acron Aviation is to continuously innovate. We have a mission to innovate to create safer skies. We used the ‘create safer skies’ as our mission for some time in our former guise as L3 Commercial Aviation.

But we really wanted to really call out the innovating in our pilot training business and in our avionics business. That is what we have done and will continue to do – innovate new products, and on the training side of the business, innovate training, new simulators. There’s an opportunity for use to move into advanced air mobility (AAM) for simulation, for example. We’re developing our classroom devices, our virtual maintenance training for engineers, our flight training devices – the mid-level devices between classroom devices and simulators. Innovation is the heart of what we want to do

CAT: And does the AAM focus you mention include eVTOL and UAS?

RGF: We looking at both. And both on the avionics side. For example, we have developed a light-weight, flight data recorder as weight is obviously a critical part of the components. There is that side of the market and the training side of the market. That is still playing out in terms of regulator certification that will be required. It is likely to be less, in my view, than the conventional full-flight simulator model. But it will be much more in terms of using some of the technologies we see here [at WATS 2025]. There will probably be a greater use of virtual reality or augmented reality. The answer is we’ll look at both, the avionics side and training side, and make investments that make sense once the regulatory framework is clear.

CAT: As part of Acron’s innovation, highlight the commitment to R&D investments for technologies – XR, AI, data and others.

RGF: Throughout all of our products there is the thread of big data. There is also the move into AI which is much spoken of, but let’s get into the detail of need. With our flight data recorders we are very familiar with producing huge amounts of data. Alongside that we can talk about Wi-fi connections of our data recorders so we can have real-time download of that information. But what you do with that data, whether it is in our avionics or our simulators, is the issue of you harvesting that data and using the artificial intelligence to make meaningful understanding of the trends that are occurring – whether it be training trends or the way the aircraft is operated. We have a data analytics division. Our new owner, TJC, has a company that operates in an adjacent space, not quite the same, but we want to use our data analytics business to have that thread of data analysis going through. We will be investing in AI tools for our internal use. We think it is inevitable. The simplest way I look at AI in an internal sense, is if you are able to do a task in eight hours, you will be able to do them in five. Using AI will equip our internal people with a much more efficient way of processing our information. But if we take that concept into our products – how do we take the AI tools to make our training simulators much more insightful in terms of the training output, or our avionics products to be much more insightful into the trends we are observing.

CAT: Does Acron Aviation have regional priorities around the globe for enhanced current or new business opportunities?

RGF: There is no specific one. We have structured ourselves to be a global entity. We have a global sales team in the classic markets of Asia-Pacific, Middle East-Africa, Europe and the Americas. We will service all those four regional markets. Critical to our new approach, as a stand-alone business, we will have the capital and opportunity to grow our business. Our owners have capital available. Their explicit aim is for us to grow the business, organically and inorganically where there are opportunities that make sense. That may have a geographic dimension to it, but there is not a specific geographic are we are focused on.

What is going to be different is that we have launched as a standalone business the values of customer first, moving fast, own it and speaking candidly. All of those are short, snappy values so our people and customers can remember them. Critically behind them is move fast. Because we are a standalone company, we will be much more agile than we were in the past. We do not have the corporate overhead, the corporate lack of momentum you sometime have with large companies in terms of decision-making. We’ll be able to make decisions much more quickly. We have an executive team led by our CEO Alan Crawford. He reports to our owners at TJC. The executive team will be able to make decisions in a much more speedily manner. We have devolved that decision-making right down to our product lines. We have done that deliberately to make them more accountable for their decisions and to make the decisions quickly. Part of what we want to try to engage in going forward is living our values but taking all the benefits and opportunities being a standalone company allows.

CAT: Thanks for taking time to meet with CAT during the busy WATS.

RGF: You are quite welcome.