The first of a new ‘Yocova ab initio’ series covering key aviation and technical specialties. Today, we’re diving into digitalisation, a topic with massive implications for the future of aviation.
Aviation digitalisation is both wide and deep in scope, covering all levels of work in arenas from ground operations to flight operations, safety to sustainability, passenger experience to cargo operations, airports to headquarters, MRO to reservations [Embracing Airline Digital Transformation PDF], air traffic management and beyond.
But there are immediate digitalisation requirements during the restart, especially around test and vaccination requirements, with IATA director general and former IAG boss Willie Walsh emphasising that “we must automate the checking of vaccine and test certificates before traffic ramps up. The technical solutions exist. But governments must agree digital certificate standards and align processes to accept them. And they must act fast.”
Even before COVID-19, however, thinktank CAPA highlighted six areas of challenge across the numerous aviation digitalisation verticals:
- The unwillingness of management to change existing business models and business processes, due, in turn, to the misconceptions of digital transformation and the uncertainty behind transformative initiatives;
- Varied stages of development of businesses within different sectors of the aviation industry, calling for widely different strategies and their timings;
- The significant gap between the capabilities of legacy technology systems and processes, and the contemporary customer centric technology systems and processes needed to engage with customers and provide personalised services;
- The complexity of some sectors within the aviation industry and management’s sentiment to engage in transformation quickly;
- Resistance to the implementation of fail/fast initiatives even in areas that do not relate to safety considerations;
- The continuation of planning cycles based on an annual planning schedule.
But digitalisation isn’t just about the operational efficiency head: it’s about the service heart too, especially when it comes to passengers. Yes, there is a substantial market of people who have really missed international travel over the last eighteen-plus months. But there was already a wellspring of anxious and nervous passengers before the pandemic, and the high-profile uptick in air rage and disruptive passenger incidents suggests that reducing anxiety as a trigger could be helpful.
Inflight connectivity provider Inmarsat cites digitalisation of the passenger experience as “critical”, with chief executive officer Rupert Pearce saying that “with safety and reputation becoming even more important to today’s flyers, there is a clear need for airlines to differentiate themselves in order to encourage passengers back onto their flights. Digitalisation lies at the heart of both; minimising critical touchpoints in the passenger journey to improve confidence, all the while keeping passengers connected and entertained.”
Digitalising in the delivery of new and innovative passenger experience — and improving the efficiency of existing provision — is firmly on the agenda.
In terms of passenger catering alone, a survey from catering powerhouse LSG revealed that a full 69% of airline respondents were interested in testing new digital services, include pre-ordering and pre-selection of inflight catering, in the near-term to mid-2022. Even the remaining 31% considered that pre-order and pre-select options might be both compatible with their brands and feasible in an operational sense. Indeed, it’s hard to see why there would be much of a brand barrier when both Singapore Airlines (through its renowned Book the Cook service) and its in-house LCC Scoot offer pre-ordering.
But, across the digitalisation agenda, challenges remain. Beyond the short term COVID restart challenges, there are four key themes that airlines, suppliers and other players in the aviation arena will need to address:
- interoperability, data portability and platform agnosticism in the context of data security, intellectual property and data ownership
- determining the right level of insourcing and outsourcing for each airline, including the right level of in-house contractual, subject-matter and executive oversight of outsourced contracts
- designing education and training for both digital-native and pre-digital-native workers
- creating enabling frameworks across the public and private sector that enable and encourage digitalisation while guarding against data overreach
In pursuing the digitalisation agenda, a key lesson from the pandemic is that real-world requirements — like digitalisation of testing, vaccination and recovery certification — are visible to aviation months or even years before regulators and governments start taking action. It will be vital to build this reality into aviation’s digitalised future from the very start.
Author: John Walton
Published: 6th July 2021
Photo by Rodrigo Soares on Unsplash
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We are talking about this over in our Challenges Area: Digitalisation has massive potential for aviation, but are the opportunities for ROI achievable when balanced against the challenges of implementation and time to value for digital investments?
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