Building a new airline is no easy task. Doing it amidst a global pandemic adds massive complexity to the process. For Breeze Airways, the new US carrier and latest airline for serial aviation entrepreneur David Neeleman, the net result is an operation more digital from the get-go than originally anticipated, even for a carrier starting out with a fleet of a dozen Embraer E-Jets, with Airbus A220s starting to arrive.
Chief operating officer Tom Anderson tells us that he sees opportunities for more efficient, streamlined operations compared to prior airline startups. But not everything is better on the digital side. Some aspects of the business are keen to shift back to in person, at least in part.
Breeze executives planned for this airline to be different from the others in a number of ways: network, fleet, style, and approach to the airline experience. They did not, however, expect the startup process to be conducted almost entirely through video calls and digital messaging through the COVID-19 onset. But this has brought some benefits: even as the ability to work in person returns, parts of the business continue to benefit from the digital communications and operations future into which aviation was accelerated so sharply as a result of pandemic restrictions.
Anderson highlighted crew training as one key area where digital records deliver outsized results: “A system that tracks pilots’ training records, and then determines whether they’re qualified and automatically talks to the crew planning system which then automatically talks to the dispatch system, is much better than those interfaces being spreadsheets that get passed off from person to person.” Aircraft maintenance logging benefits similarly.
Since Breeze chose digital versions of those systems and processes from the very beginning, it can be more flexible in scaling up (or down) at different crew bases or on the unusually geographically diverse, point-to-point destination network it operates.
With crew services, dispatch, maintenance, weather, and other departments all operating on fully digitized platforms it might be appealing to consider a fully distributed workforce. Current FAA regulatory requirements would block that plan, though Anderson does see potential to demonstrate alternate means of compliance and convince the FAA that an Operations Control Center might not need to be a specific physical location.
But Breeze does not want to go fully distributed, at least not completely, and not yet. Having the various groups working together, “under one roof, in one room, leads to faster, richer interactions” for the company, Anderson says. He is keen on the ability for staff to lean over a cubicle wall for an immediate and more nuanced conversation about operations than the generally slower and more binary results of an email or text message.
But Anderson does see potential to change the way airlines staff their operations, leveraging a hybrid approach to the Operations Control Center. Leaving aside the challenges of staffing through COVID, an airline is typically overstaffed for blue sky days and understaffed for major troubles. He sees opportunity in splitting the operations between in person and remote. On the blue sky days the normal staff could handle operations in person. As troubles arise, however, the company could flex up with remote workers.
This sort of approach already works for call centers. Bringing it into the back office operations, however, would be a new tactic for airlines.
Improving digital processes when it comes to ground processes, however, is relatively easy, even with the regulatory overhead. Improving the processes in the aircraft, and especially in the air, remains far more challenging. With aircraft lifecycles measured in decades rather than the months of consumer electronics systems, there are real disconnects — literally and figuratively — between a 2021 tablet in the hands of a maintenance engineer and an aircraft that predates the iMac. Everything from the connecting ports, cables, operating systems, programming languages and beyond means that, when an airline looks to link up its aircraft and its operational and MRO systems, developing a truly future proof digital ecosystem within the airline operation that can evolve and mature with the commercial market is an important consideration.
Aircraft technicians today often manage their maintenance processes with antiquated hardware. Like other airlines, Breeze maintains a set of legacy laptops with the older software and hardware interfaces that allow engineers to interact with its Embraer E-Jet fleet, some of which date back to the mid-2000s. Getting beyond this complex, specialised, time-consuming and high-specialty legacy-to-legacy technology approach would require a different approach to how the interfaces are designed and implemented.
As one option here, the industry could replace this aircraft-to-laptop model with one where data is offloaded from the aircraft through a satellite connection, via a cellular connection on the ground, or through interfaces that can evolve with the commercial hardware that will need to read them through the middle of the century or beyond. These systems are less likely to be retrofit to existing aircraft, which poses a complicated set of questions to an airline like Breeze starting up with previously operated aircraft. But they could deliver significant value if integrated as part of new aircraft or engine designs.
Breeze still has a long way to grow: the carrier is adding a new fleet type (the Airbus A220-300), operating bases, and route network design. Building on this flexible and digital base, however, the company expects a smoother path to that future. And these digital technologies, while potentially challenging to adopt into existing operations, could pay handsome dividends for the airlines and manufacturers willing to make the investment.
Author: Seth Miller
Published: 25th January 2022
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