Walk into any airline operations centre and you’ll see the big live maps on the wall, tracking the carrier’s aircraft wherever it flies. These maps — and the data behind them provided by flight tracking services including FlightAware and FlightRadar24 — have revolutionised the world of flight operations. But what’s coming down the track?
“The biggest change in the last 10 years has been as much expectations as it has been technology,” Mark Duell, vice president at FlightAware, tells us, speaking just before Collins Aerospace’s completion of its acquisition of the company.
“In some countries, the US in particular, there had been long-standing flight-following requirements that a lot of the rest of the world didn’t have,” Duell explains, but notes that “it was sort of a big surprise to everyone, when we had events like Air France 447, and Malaysia Airlines 370, that there wasn’t great flight tracking.”
Momentum grew behind drives like IATA’s Aircraft Tracking Task Force and ICAO’s Global Tracking Initiative, resulting in GADSS, the Global Aeronautical Distress and Safety System and other mandates.
In response, Duell explains, “we’ve seen both the implementation of the regulatory side mandates to enforce that, and then also on the technology side. Historically, fight tracking was mostly either getting data out of the ANSP [air navigation service providers], which worked well, if you were operating within one or a few ANSPs that were cooperative, or using some sort of data link like ACARS for flight tracking.”
The development of services with large terrestrial ADS-B [Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast] networks offering tracking across national and ANSP borders, including the satellite space-based Aireon, changed the safety game, and with this new data available the world of operations was also transformed.
Airline operations teams and flight dispatchers are intimately familiar with the software, Duell explains. “Some of the big sort of IT vendors within aviation — so your Collins Aerospace, SITA, Lufthansa Systems, Jeppesen, IBM — are offering tools that are on every dispatcher’s desktop, and taking in all FlightAware’s data, and to display that to the end user, often combined with other data like messaging to and from the cockpit.”
But airlines — and air traffic management providers — are starting to use flight tracking for more than the “maps in ops” kind of use case. Network operations centres and ANSPs will increasingly use tracking in combination with algorithms, machine learning and artificial intelligence to automatically determine where irregular operations are happening (or might happen) and to manage them.
New, better data means new, better decision-making
“The next big step is leveraging the existing tracking data to enable more efficient and functional decision making, both at the ANSP and airline level,” Mikael Robertsson, co-founder of Flightradar24, tells us. “This is already starting to happen with numerous programs designed to improve routing and trajectories based the increased precision now available in flight tracking.”
This increased precision has been driven by a number of factors, he notes, including technological change.
“Over the last ten years, we’ve seen the wholesale adoption of the ADS-B standard, dramatically increasing the ability to easily track flights with a small radio receiver kit. Switchovers from Mode S transponders to ADS-B opened up a world of possibilities thanks to the increased accuracy and reliability of the technology. In the past few years we’ve seen the introduction of satellite-based ADS-B receivers and that has truly made real-time global flight tracking a reality.”
But with that real-time global flight tracking comes the risk of information overload. Dispatchers and operations staff might potentially be interested in hundreds of aircraft in their airline’s fleets, travelling to and from nearly as many airports. Spotting the patterns — both normal patterns and exceptions to the norms — will be crucial.
Enter some technological assistance.
“Applications on the dispatcher’s desktop will move to be much more of a managed by exception” kind of situation, FlightAware’s Mark Duell suggests. This might involve some sort of de-emphasis of aircraft on schedule at the expected altitude and speed, but flagging of “aircraft that are expected to enter holds, or that have already entered holds, or are diverting — those sorts of things will be much, much more prioritised so the dispatcher can spend their energy dealing with what needs to be done for those, rather than trying to figure out which aircraft needs their attention at the moment.”
Getting to this future requires changes both in the air and on the ground.
On the aircraft, it’s about releasing data that largely already exists onboard (particularly within the flight management system) but that isn’t currently passed off the aircraft. This might be via a wider band satellite communications system like Ka- or Ku-band connectivity, something narrower like L-band, ACARS, VHF, or ADS-B — or indeed a mixture of these systems depending on the sensitivity of the data to be used.
Duell suggests that this new operational data means there is a new domain of inflight connectivity, beyond the air traffic control vs passenger connectivity line that has by and large been in place.
This new operational domain “is certainly higher priority and higher sensitivity and security oriented than, you know, the passenger IFC, but it’s not quite at the level” of the ATC domain, Duell assesses. This opens up opportunities: L-band systems have a strong safety proposition, while the acquisition of Inmarsat by Viasat may well bring new opportunities in the Ka- and Ku-band spheres. New constellations, particularly the low-earth-orbit options from SpaceX and OneWeb, may also provide interesting avenues to explore.
On the ground, meanwhile, the crux will be developing algorithms, machine learning and AI to spot, learn, process and detect patterns, and to apply them to analogous future situations. As the Internet of Things arrives on the aircraft, more and more data points will be fed into those patterns.
Taken altogether, “we’re looking forward to an industry with better predictability”, Duell says. “And I think everyone in the industry — from those who are actually operating the aircraft to the passengers, people meeting the passengers, people who are receiving cargo — would all benefit from more predictability.”
Author: John Walton
Published: 7th December 2021
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