Flight operations is seeing a period of route disruption and flight uncertainty, from volcanic eruptions to conflict zones and more. To learn more about how this crucial part of the industry is adapting, we spoke with experts from around the industry for a status check and forecast of the trends for flight operations worldwide.
Andrew Nicholson, chief executive officer of Osprey Flight Solutions, tells us that “the increasing complexity of the environment in which aviation is operating now has been quite dramatic. We’re faced with wars in Ukraine, conflict in Armenia and Azerbaijan, conflict in Israel and Gaza. These are issues that have increasing impact on the aviation sector.”
This is an existential challenge for many in the industry: Finnair’s entire business model changed, while the spike in demand for Europe-Asia stopovers has created a geopolitical situation for airlines like Cathay Pacific akin to the late 1980s and early 1990s, routing traffic to east Asia via Hong Kong as a hub — though with aircraft two or three generations newer meaning that an additional stopover is no longer required.
More widely, Nicholson highlights, the staffing crunch is biting in flight operations too: “whilst the demand for flights has increased and continues to increase, and will increase beyond 2019 levels, the resources that the industry has to deal with are not as good as they were prior. That’s an issue because a lot of skilled people went off to find different jobs when they were put on furlough or laid off, and found out that there are other sectors that they enjoy working in.”
In this context, bringing the digitalisation and operational benefits of inflight connectivity to more and more aircraft — especially those in smaller scale operational environments — is complex, with specialists like Bluebox focusing on some of the harder-to-digitalise parts of aviation.
Fresh off recent trials and deployments with Air Serbia, Air Japan and PLAY, head of marketing Catherine Brown tells us that a key trend is “the rapid expansion beyond the ‘entertainment’ part of inflight entertainment, or IFE, to a multi-service digital engagement model over what are still called IFE systems.”
And, like much of the modern world, those digital systems need to be updated for performance and security, with operational systems requiring particular care.
Here, Brown explains, “The pace of change including the volume of new digital services appearing creates risks for both maintaining existing and introducing new services. You might be able to update software more rapidly than hardware on board an aircraft, but it still is a resource intensive process, from just keeping track of version and standards updates of existing technology which can be a challenge. Add to that the sheer number of new potential services — from destination and travel services, to new advertising and retail services, personalisation and travel disruption, to Internet-of-Things-type add-ons.”
New technologies like AI are already being implemented, with aviation’s characteristic carefulness when it comes to flight operations. Initial work from air navigation service providers includes incremental, test-based changes such as algorithms providing additional information to controllers. This might include, for example, flagging or highlighting aircraft whose behaviour is outside a set of programmed norms, with next steps including experimenting with technologies like machine learning and deep learning to generate those norms.
Even within the cabin environment, Brown says, advanced algorithms and AI are likely to bring substantial benefits. “We’re still early on our AI journey with our customers, but once the analytics and insights foundations are in place, the idea that AI can then inform decision making on the basis of the real-time data — suggesting what changes to the menu or merchandise or bundles, and when and on which routes… that’s a whole other level of interest.”
Author: John Walton
Published 18th January 2024
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