ab initio: ground operations

“Ground operations,” says the US Federal Aviation Administration in the second chapter of its Airplane Flying Handbook, “is where safe flight begins and ends.” From preparation and planning including flight and crew scheduling and route optimisation through to ground handling of aircraft, this vital part of the aviation puzzle has never been so challenged as during the COVID-19 pandemic.

headline link: Airplane Flying Handbook

Flight crew scheduling remains complicated

Flight crew availability, currency, proficiency, medical clearance and — once that is completed — scheduling has been a substantial challenge for many airlines, particularly across aircraft types. https://twitter.com/DaveWallsworth/status/1430787799482093568

To complicate matters, many destinations have implemented quarantine or managed quarantine requirements for flight crew, particularly in jurisdictions where elimination strategies have been pursued and where crew have brought COVID back with them. 

Some regulators have implemented temporary measures to enable some operational flexibility, including relaxing or removing flight and duty time limitations to allow deadheading and crew positioning for return flights to avoid quarantine — or indeed potential on-ground exposure downroute. 

Yet risks remain, with ICAO identifying seventeen key areas of concern around fatigue management alone, from rostering issues to workload distribution, airport congestion, complications from the use of PPE, short-notice changes to operations or duty times, as well as substantial delays. [See PDF, p4]

While there are certainly some quick wins in terms of rethinking the business as usual of crew scheduling, a variety of digital crew management solutions are now on offer from a growing number of vendors to help airlines work through these problems via transformative technology.

The best known include Jeppesen’s Crew Management System, Sabre Crew Manager, AIMS Crew Management and CAE (formerly Merlot Aero) — although many other players are entering the game. Solutions like these offer a new digital way to innovate through these challenges, offering options for crew pairing, rostering, tracking, bidding and assignment, embedded fatigue risk management, crew administration and workforce planning.

In particular, they help to solve the complexities around combining disparate sources of data, processing them in as automated a way as possible, and creating actionable business intelligence to help make schedules as efficient and robust as possible. 

But, crucially, these systems also need to work together with other elements of airlines’, airports’ and ground service providers’ increasingly digital operations.

Route optimisation shows increasing promise

The growth of satellite-based Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) systems has revolutionised route planning and optimisation. Systems such as Aireon reduce costs, enable the best choice of routes and flight profiles, reduce emissions, and above all improve safety.

Across the North Atlantic, optimising routes for winds could save something approaching 20 percent of air distance, and an average fuel and carbon emissions savings of 2.5 percent. As a comparison, that’s more than the 2 percent savings from Aviation Partners’ Split Scimitar Winglets for the Boeing 737 NG. Indeed, for the first time in at least sixty years — indeed, so long ago that nobody is entirely certain just how long — the North Atlantic Tracks system implemented zero westbound tracks earlier this year. 

Further optimisation on the ground and in the air will create further opportunities for more efficient operations and lower emissions, and some of the latest digital flight planning systems are focussed on just that.

The newest generation of systems will often bring in the latest technologies like cloud-based planning engines, applications via web or mobile OS, and even flight planning as a service. 

Given the relatively disparate, multi-provider context of the aviation IT landscape, most will include a range of APIs (application programming interfaces) to allow airlines to integrate flight planning with other systems.

Ground handling is a major challenge

With COVID-19, ground handlers have needed to adapt to some of the most dynamic conditions the industry has ever seen. Travel restrictions have been turned off, on, then back off again, and now in some cases back on. This will continue as long as variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus take hold in different countries and regions.

Part of that adaptation is ensuring that staff are ready: and that means available, fully trained and up to date with their training. That is especially important for ground handling operators — airline or outsourced — that have lost staff during the pandemic, especially where the need to replace those staff comes in the context of a wider labour shortage, particularly in technical and manual fields.

Part of that adaptation is about reviewing processes to ensure safe operations, for staff and for passengers. 

Airline trade association IATA has a three-page, ten-section checklist for operating during a pandemic, ranging from risk assessments to distancing strategies, PPE, case management and operational issue management. [PDF, pp5-7]

UN body ICAO, meanwhile, flags issues including an increase in wildlife, deterioration of little-used airport surfaces or areas, additional preparation for first flight return to service, fuel planning, flight deck sanitisation, setup and access limitation, restrictions on walkarounds, and flight preparation time pressures where flights are unusually empty — or indeed full. [PDF, section 3.2]

And part of the adaptation is remaining as flexible as possible, and planning for yet more uncertainty. Crucially, though, this can’t just be adapting to return to a pre-COVID status quo ante: airports, airlines, ground handling providers and other actors on the ground handling stage need to work together to improve efficiency through the use of better industrial methodologies like lean enterprise and six sigma, as well as a new generation of technological improvements.“COVID-19 may have pushed the Fourth Industrial Revolution out of the headlines, but it has not stopped it”, says KPMG, in its Aviation 2030 forecast report [PDF], predicting fundamental disruption from technologies such as AI, big data, the Internet of Things, electric and automated vehicles, synthetic and hydrogen fuels, and the rise of VTOL, air taxi and uncrewed aircraft.

As KPMG puts it, “the ground handling ecosystem will need to evolve rapidly in response to these technologies and others. Players looking to thrive in the post-COVID normal need to assess now both the threats and opportunities presented for their long-term strategy.”