Light aircraft are expensive bits of kit, and the priciest component by far is the engine — usually somewhere between £30–£50K. So imagine discovering that your aircraft’s engine has been stolen. Now imagine that, during the investigation, that same engine turns up in a war zone bolted onto a large drone. How would you feel then…

This isn’t a hypothetical. I have friends who’ve been through exactly this. And unlike cars with noisy alarms sitting on your driveway, aircraft tend to live in a hangar tucked away in a corner of an airfield — no power, no internet, and basically no security. So, being the resident techy IoT guy, I got asked the obvious question: is there anything we can do about this?

This talk walks through how I’ve used .NET C# on a tiny IoT board running nanoFramework, combined with the power of Azure, to bring real security to light aircraft. We’ll look at the ideas behind the solution, why certain choices were made, and then dig into the code, the Azure stack, and the current (very alpha) state of the project. I’ll also cover what’s planned next, including a MAUI mobile app and Azure-based messaging.

So come along, join the fight against stolen engines, and let’s make life a lot harder for the bad guys.

This is going to be an open source project showcasing DotNET C#, nanoFramework and of course Azure, I am a Microsoft MVP for developer technologies.

This talk has been given via video stream at meet-ups and works well in person but I would need a table rather than a podium to set-up the kit.