Salient Motion, a California-based supplier of aerospace and defence components, claims to have developed motion control systems for commercial aircraft that can be certified within months rather than years. The company is working with Boeing to advance its actuation systems, for mechanisms in aircraft ranging from passenger seating controls to cargo handling, all of which use a modular platform that reuses certified components across different programmes.
Salient Motion’s technology replaces single-use hardware architectures with a reconfigurable platform that the company says is built more like a modern software stack, and is reusable, upgradable, and fast to certify.
“In aerospace, certification costs and timelines have always been the biggest drag on innovation,” said Vishaal Mali, Salient Motion’s co-founder and CEO. “By modularising hardware and reusing certified software across systems, we’re compressing development timelines and cutting those costs dramatically.”
Industry investment
The company’s approach has attracted investment from AE Ventures, a private investment firm specialising in tech startups, with USD$7.5 billion of assets under management. Unlike some conventional supplier relationships, Salient Motion’s model treats OEMs as development partners, with shared R&D investment and aftermarket revenues and reduced non-recurring engineering costs for each new programme.
“Our modular platform lets aerospace evolve the way software does,” Mali added. “Certify once, deploy everywhere. That’s the leverage modern aviation has been missing.”
Reduced launch costs
Salient Motion says that its model of reusing previously certified hardware and software across aircraft programmes means it can develop and qualify new systems in a shorter time frame than starting with new hardware each time, which also reduces the cost of launching components into the market. Standardised digital interfaces further simplify integration, reducing engineering overhead and shortening production timelines.
“We are focused on components where we can drive meaningful performance and cost improvements with our motion control technology,” explained Mali. “By focusing on building cost-effective, certifiable systems for our OEM and airline partners, we’re able to provide a second source more efficiently than ever before.”
Salient Motion’s broader mission is to replace legacy components across commercial aviation, defence, and space applications. The company’s modular, software-driven platform is designed to extend beyond actuation into a wide range of aircraft systems.
