Fyve By, an Atlanta-based company, aims to solve the widespread problem of hangar noise while improving the safety of ground operations.

Benjamin Youngstrom, co-founder of Fyve By, explained that the vision for the company is an evolution of its original goal.

“The inspiration came from a desire to create a functional change in aviation, and we started with the idea of ​​making autonomous tugs and ground equipment,” Youngstrom said. “As we worked on it, we realized why all the previous autonomous ground equipment companies had failed and why all the ones out there today will fail.”

“The problem is they need infrastructure. When you’re driving a tug, you can’t see anything behind the front of the aircraft, even when you’re driving smaller jets. So if you put the sensors for an autonomous tug on the tug itself, it’s going to have exactly the same problem as a human. You need to build infrastructure, and when we started designing the external vision for the tug, we realized that the external vision is the product, not the autonomous ground support equipment.”

The shift in focus to developing a tool for ground crew occurred in early 2023, and the Fyve By team has been working hard to bring the product to market ever since.

“Hangar rash incidents easily add up to billions of dollars in damage per year, especially when you factor in not just the damage itself, but additional training costs, lost revenue, lost confidence, additional depreciation of the aircraft and customer care costs,” Youngstrom said. “So while the exact repair bill (to fix the damage) is only a few billion dollars per year, when you calculate the total sunk costs, including opportunity costs, you get to five to ten billion dollars in industry spending.”

They expect their solution will help reduce hangar rash incidents, which are a nuisance to operators, FBOs, insurers and others.

“We started with regular security cameras and then moved on to 3D cameras, called stereo cameras,” Younstrom said. “But we quickly realized that they were too expensive to install and unreliable. They never gave us the best view of what we were working on in the hangar.”

After further iterations, Fyve By’s proprietary product Sky View was introduced in early 2024. As the name suggests, it serves as an eye in the sky and helps control the movements of aircraft in the hangar.

“Eventually we moved to lidar, which is very complicated to use,” he said. “It’s a talent-intensive technology. You have to understand robotics and have a deep understanding of computer vision. After we closed our pre-seed funding round, we hired a very capable team of engineers who managed to develop a really reliable system that identifies aircraft, equipment, vehicles and everything else in a hangar.”

“We can use this identification to display a 3D representation on a tablet, accompanied by audible and visual warnings if you get too close to something that can cause damage. Essentially, I like to call the end product a ‘Honda Sense’ style rearview camera for aircraft movement and control.

“The goal was to give line crew something simple and straightforward that would not be distracting and would instead simply add value. And when it doesn’t add value (when planes are not in danger of colliding with each other), it should be something that is almost unnoticeable.”

The system has additional existing features that the team says are missing from other products.

“Currently, the Sky View system also allows the crew to perform a ‘test fit and target designation’ with the system,” said Youngstrom. “Before moving an aircraft, they can use their tablet to place an exact replica of the aircraft they want to move in the hangar. The system tells them if the aircraft will fit where they want it, and they can do a target designation at that location. Unlike the hangar stacking products on the market where you have to estimate placement in the hangar based on a printed sheet of paper, our ‘test fit and target designation’ feature allows you to be confident that you have placed your aircraft exactly where you want it.”

Sky View is currently in beta testing, with a healthy mix of different customer types trying out the technology for themselves.

“We are selling pre-orders to customers and have existing orders from both private flight departments and FBOs,” he said. “As part of our beta program, we have an FBO, a maintenance facility and a private flight department. That equates to 10 hangars and about a quarter of a billion dollars worth of aircraft currently protected by our system.”

Youngstrom and the Fyve By team are optimistic about the impact they expect on the aviation industry.

“There’s a lot to come for our technology,” he said. “We’re looking at features like full range stacking, which considers not just whether the aircraft will theoretically fit in a hangar, but whether a human or machine can realistically move it where they want it. We’re also looking at providing automatic slowing, braking and other semi-robotic modules.” But our real focus now is on building useful, reliable and consistent products that make the lives of line crews, maintenance personnel, maintenance managers, FBO managers and insurance adjusters easier. We don’t want to be another overhyped, money-grabbing Silicon Valley tech startup that ends up bloated and worthless. We want to be the safe and reliable new industry standard for moving aircraft in hangars and on the ramp.”