In the latest article of our post-pandemic series, we reflect on the ways ground ops in aviation have changed forever. This time we discuss the topic with the Airport Services Association and ground handler ndata.
What happens when your industry stops — almost overnight — and what’s left is the sort of operation that you’ve almost never done before? That was the unprecedented experience of the ground handling sector during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. As the industry accelerates into a new normal, we sat down with Fabio Gamba, director general of ground handler trade body the Airport Services Association, and with Guillaume Crozier, senior vice president for UAE cargo at dnata, to develop a real picture of the situation within the ground operations sector, and to learn from key developments since the start of the pandemic.
When COVID hit, Gamba tells us, “for two years, we couldn’t operate: we were barely operating at 20% of our previous capacity. And then suddenly, when all the bans [were lifted], suddenly, we found ourselves with huge peaks in demand, and as much as we wished we could have anticipated things and we could have accommodated demands, we didn’t have the people — as simple as that.”
The staffing crisis has been a common theme throughout aviation, but in the ground handling sector where much activity was outsourced, and in some cases thus ineligible for aviation protection and recovery funding, this was particularly complex.
For ground handlers, Gamba says, “for the last two and a half years, the point of stress has been for them to keep their job. In Europe, I think up to 60% of them did lose their job. For a part of the time, they were on furlough schemes: most of the cases, their salary was being taken over by the state. That only applies to a major majority of countries, but at the same time not everywhere, first, and second, not for the whole duration.”
Gamba highlights a key strategic risk to the ground handling industry: the way that the pandemic emphasised a certain lack of attractiveness of key on-the-apron jobs.
“I think the pandemic was a revelator of something more profound: the loss of the attraction of the sector to the people,” he explains. “I think with the new generations coming up, we’re becoming less and less attractive. It’s up to the sector to reinvent itself, to find a way to be become to really become attractive to these new generations. So: what are we talking about? We’re talking about, obviously, low salaries, difficult working conditions, and what have you.”
Aviation has always been cyclical, but the disruption from the way travel essentially ceased during the pandemic was more than that. “We’ve lost a lot of our skilled workforce to other sectors,” Gamba notes, “and that’s the first time that it really happened so quickly.”
Yet ground handlers still had to deliver skeleton services as cargo requirements changed dramatically: not only did online shopping boom but pandemic cargo delivery — all the way down to vaccine shipment — was all new to the industry.
“One of the big changes,” dnata’s Guillaume Crozier tells us, “was the delivering of volume: the number of passengers dropped and number of turnarounds dropped. Cargo really increased, interestingly, and that was one of the golden years for e-commerce. We did see a huge increase of volume — and also the processes have changed. PACO flights, passenger aircraft carrying cargo only, because of lack of belly capacity: we had to find other ways with our customers to actually carry cargo. New standard operating procedures, new training — that was definitely a big, big shift.”
Ground handling technology and processes saw a major acceleration during COVID
To deal with this shift, many ground handlers sped up their development, adoption and maturation when it came to digitalising their businesses.
Crozier starts from the brass tacks: “recording is step one, then it’s about computing the data together. And then because you record the right data, because you have the right data touchpoints, and you compute all the data together in the right place — data warehouses and data infrastructure — then you can start thinking about semi-automation, potentially automation. And then you can potentially think about artificial intelligence, which triggers machine learning and then a PDCA [Plan Do Check Act] wave, which is quite basic, but very powerful. With all of this, you can really improve your processes and formally digitalise your business.”
Ground handlers use a variety of tools within this digitalisation toolkit. Modern turnaround applications timestamp every step, comparing it against pre-digital plans, service level agreements and creating a precision time schedule for analysis, revision, implementation and potential iteration.
On the tech side, Crozier says, “telematics is a big thing, because it is all about utilisation. You can imagine in a very volatile and uncertain environment, you want to make sure you really deploy your equipment, your resources, as you need, delivering the promises to the customer as per your vision, mission and values. Telematics is really useful to understand utilisation of ground service equipment. That was planned before, but we just accelerated the implementation during COVID.”
As one example, a cloud-based appointment and dock management system gives visibility and predictability to the approach of an incoming truck to the ground side of a cargo facility. For exports, this allows faster unloading, greater truck dock utilisation, and optimised preparation of ULDs (Unit Load Devices). For imports, knowing which trucks are arriving in what order means that ULDs can be unloaded for transshipment in the most efficient way.
Dnata also accelerated development of its trading portal, CALOGI, in partnership with Kale Logistics Solutions. Initially launched in 2008 and aimed primarily to digitalise the cargo process for the SME market, the new CALOGI enables real-time information sharing, as well as API integrations with both users’ own systems and other dnata platforms.
In some cases, integrating new hardware can be relatively simple, Crozier says, such as “equipping our ground service equipment with 360-degree cameras: we did that in the USA, for all the fleets to really increase the focus on safety, on awareness, and give us a very good opportunity to increase safety behaviour.”
But when it comes to hardware, “what we look for is something that is quite hardware-agnostic, where actually you can have multiple applications in the same hardware,” Crozier explains. “If not, it becomes very difficult for our staff to handle all the applications.”
On the software side, he notes, “we have a strong group with with huge capability in terms of data infrastructure, in terms of data warehouse — working with snowflake as we speak — and we have a lot of competent and skilled resource in terms of data scientists and enterprise analytics capability, which helps us to work on on all of this.”
Yet even with the resource-multiplying benefits of a digitalised business and new technologies, sometimes the most powerful action that can be taken is to stop activity within an area of business, even one newly developed.
Crozier explains that dnata was among the first service providers with remote robotic UV sanitisation of aircraft, working with a Swiss startup. Airlines, he says, “wanted something safe, which could actually trigger the confidence again so everyone feels safe travelling.”
Yet, surprising many, UV cleaning did not take off in a meaningful way. “We realised this is not something that we could push further, so we parked it,” Crozier says frankly. “Sometimes you have very, very high momentum on something, with high profile requirements — we want to deliver the best to our customer for them to deliver on their promises.”
But, he explains: “we did that, it’s not working, we stopped it: if it’s not what the market wants — or the customer wants — any longer, then you stop it. What a learning curve from an innovation cultural viewpoint!”
Author: John Walton
Published 19th January 2023
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