As much of the world — and indeed the aviation industry — moves into a new phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, a key question for airlines, airports, service providers and all the industry’s players is where to focus still-constrained budget for digitalisation and technology investment.
Technology supplier SITA is focussing in on five specific challenge areas for a prioritised tech spend in a new paper, “Your Runway To Success”. As with many similar white papers and reports, there’s a sales pitch — SITA has at least one product that it believes meets each of these challenges, you will probably be unsurprised to learn — but the focus areas are themselves informative and thought-provoking.
The first challenge is around managing new — and frequently changing — health requirements. This is certainly bang on trend, with a variety of disparate, unlinked and unverifiable vaccination/testing/recovery proof apps being released, from New York State’s (which appears to verify a picture of a cat where a vaccination card should be) to the interoperable-in-some-but-not-all-cases vaccine apps in Europe.
There are two existing elements to this challenge: first, to move the process to before passengers arrive at their departure airport to the extent possible, and second, to automate it, or at least to drastically reduce the number of passengers who must be manually checked by staffers at the airport. A third element is also likely to arise, namely the need to detect and reject fraudulent or forged certification.
Solutions include adding a vaccination/testing/recovery proof process in the airline’s app, or via one of the travel pass services operated by IATA or, indeed, SITA.
The second challenge is around the passenger experience at the airport, particularly boosting touchless and automated technology, from biometric identity through the airport to self-service processing at checkin, bag drop and boarding.
It’s closely linked to the third challenge, the passenger experience onboard, again focussing on touchless. That varies from onboard pre-ordering and live ordering from an airline’s app or over its onboard wifi connection to crew tablets and onboard passenger connectivity.
For both of these challenges, it’s fortunate that evolving passenger behaviours are heading in the same direction as the industry here. If many passengers had a germophobic streak to them before COVID, that is only magnified now. But in addition, people are increasingly used to using their faces to unlock their phones, scanning QR codes, using a mobile ordering menu at bars and restaurants, and using touchless technology in the rest of their lives.
The fourth challenge is making airport operations more effective and cost-efficient, particularly around commonality of systems across airports, airlines, ground handlers and other players, as well as reducing costs and improving resilience in the event of unanticipated capacity changes by moving core services to secure clouds.
This could include upgraded networks, shared planning and/or operational systems, digital-first principles, cloud contact centres, and more.
The fifth challenge centres around improving aircraft efficiency and making aviation more sustainable. This challenge is already pressing and soon will be non-negotiable for some generations of traveller and some countries.
It will be vital for aviation to press ahead with making the current generation of operations more efficient and sustainable, even before the step-change advances coming in the next decades.
That could be everything from the growing popularity of electronic flight bags, online flight planning and digital pilot briefings through to real-time rich information exchange between aircraft and control rooms, as well as upgraded dispatcher systems and route/network planning optimisation software.
Perhaps most crucially, though, is the need for all of this to work well together. Passenger services systems must be able to manage health requirements, while airport and network efficiency has to be matched with individualised information to passengers — and all of it must be greener.
Author: John Walton
Published: 26th August 2021
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How should the key players in the aviation industry be investing in technology and digitalisation? We are discussing this on Yocova in the Challenges Area… Share your views and opinions with the aviation community.
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