As aviation grapples with artificial intelligence and machine learning, a key step is to ensure that the technological foundations and legacy systems integration are set first. We sat down with Ed Gillett, co-founder and director of tech-enabled charter brokerage CharterSync, to learn more about where the industry’s going — and what needs to happen next.
As a sector, air cargo often ends up responding to what’s in the news, and today is no exception. “If we’re looking in the short term at the moment, certainly from our perspective with regards to chartering aircraft, there’s a significant demand from the humanitarian aid and relief sector,” Gillett tells us.
With the COVID-19 pandemic and changing ways of working as accelerators, Gillett says, “this year has seen an interesting dynamic in terms of the cargo demand. We’re seeing quite a significant variation, depending on industry vertical: certainly the demand has been fluctuating quite significantly between those verticals.”
As one example, the famous images of luxury cars being loaded onto cargo aircraft, the automotive industry might be a surprising source of demand for air freight, but here as elsewhere manufacturers see benefits in air cargo’s responsiveness, especially in times of supply chain inflexibility — and some wider competing structural changes to demands.
“I think people’s perceptions and understanding — it’s almost become the norm now to wait quite a significant time to receive a new car — is feeding back to the manufacturing lines and reducing that reliance on just-in-time,” Gillett notes.
All this means that the industry is seeing demands for flexibility like rarely before, and artificial intelligence and machine learning show strong potential as tools in the flexibility toolbox.
These technologies, Gillett says, “can be used in different use cases and applications to increase the efficiency and speed of operation for a lot of air cargo processes. There are so many different ecosystems within air cargo that can benefit from these technologies — there’s no kind of one simple area to address. That’s why, collectively, it’s all different companies targeting different pain points in the industry.”
There is, however, an extent to which the cargo sector needs to progress more rapidly through early phases of digitalisation before being able to access the benefits of this kind of Industry 4.0 technology.
“There still needs to be more done in terms of setting the infrastructure up in place first, and that’s what’s being addressed by a lot of companies at the moment,” Gillett explains, summarising the current state “in terms of just getting the foundations together so that companies can connect together through APIs. Before you can connect, you need that infrastructure.”
As a rule, Gillett says, “what we see in the charter space is that there are no central systems that exist: a lot of the processes that are being done are still manual. Some airlines are still using pen and paper to work out calculations, maybe using Excel spreadsheets… it honestly is as old-fashioned as that still. So it’s a case of setting up, for example, key customer relationship management booking systems before we can start adding clever technology on top of that. You need the baseline in place first.”
Given aviation’s history at the very forefront of automation and computing almost a century ago with leading-edge technologies such as American Airlines’ 1946 Reservisor, it is perhaps ironic that it now finds itself in a context where the success (and indeed longevity) of the successors to these networks now pose generational legacy systems problems. Resolving these, where they occur, will be vital.
Yet there are extensive opportunities available to those who lean into the business optimisation that these technologies provide, Gillett concludes: “air freight demand is set to stay — and certainly seeing how everyone’s so dependent on the speed of service from aircraft, that’s always going to be a valuable option in the market.”
Author: John Walton
Published 23 November 2023
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