Category: Airports

Can airports prevent holiday travel delays? The state of AI in the aviation industry suggests it is possible.

Flight delays cause considerable harm to airport customer satisfaction during the holidays. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic and the stress it put on the industry, holiday air travel was marked by hours-long waits at the gate and on the tarmac due to inclement weather–the number one reason for holiday travel delays–and other issues. While some things are beyond the control of airport managers and staff, the need for optimized processes is clear, and that’s where Synaptic Aviation can help.

Travelers dread flying during the holiday season, and not without reason, which means airport personnel need to do everything in their power to keep customers happy. The rise of AI in the aviation industry can help assuage travelers’ fears and increase customer satisfaction by reducing delays during the holidays.

Are certain locations more prone to delays than others during the holiday season?

While it might seem logical that airports located in cooler climates would experience more delays during the holidays because of snow and ice, according to a study conducted by Magnify Money, airports in warmer locations are not spared.

In the study, the airports with the highest reported percentage of delayed holiday flights between 2008 and 2017 were:

·   Chicago Midway – 61.5% of flights delayed

·   Chicago O’Hare – 61.6% of flights delayed

·   Newark Liberty – 62.2% of flights delayed

·   Denver – 64.1% of flights delayed

·   New York Kennedy – 64.8% of flights delayed

·   Houston Hobby – 66% of flights delayed

·   Oakland – 66.1% of flights delayed

·   Salt Lake City – 67.5% of flights delayed

·   Baltimore – 68% of flights delayed

With Houston and Oakland as outliers in these statistics, it is apparent that no airport is exempt from delays at one of the busiest times of the year.

How AI in the Aviation Industry Helps Mitigate Travel Delays

With increased reliance on AI in the aviation industry, airport personnel and managers still have a way to overcome some common obstacles that are under their control.

Here are a few ways AI can help reduce the occurrence of delays during the holidays.

Increased Safety

Injuries and equipment damage on the ground prior to takeoff can delay a flight significantly. AI in the aviation industry has come a long way in preventing injuries during loading. For instance, Synaptic Aviation helps eliminate unsafe driving on the apron, ensures ground crew are wearing all required safety equipment and clothing, and sends a warning when vehicles are improperly parked and loading bridges are not fully retracted.

Optimized Operations

Optimizing operations helps ensure smooth transitions between flights. With AI technology, airports can track the progress of loading and unloading, fueling, and catering services.

Real-Time Alerts

AI can also provide alerts to those who need to know when things go wrong. Synaptic Aviation’s technology allows airport personnel to set their own parameters for alerts so that they can correct course for common negative events.

Better Training

AI in the aviation industry also allows airports to customize their training depending on the most common mistakes. Trainers can use the video captured by Synaptic Aviation’s AI to demonstrate and correct improper procedures and mistakes that happen during operations.

AI in the aviation industry is more sophisticated than ever. Are you ready to implement it for your customers?

Ready to see how AI can improve your airport and keep your customers satisfied? Having the ability to understand immediately the root cause of your operational disruptions on the ground is priceless. Synaptic Aviation has the technology to provide the answers automatically and with no effort. Request a demo at synapticaviation.com or contact us at 844-505-4496.

Ground and ramp safety are paramount to all successful aircraft operations. Airport ramp accidents can derail success metrics, such as profit, environmental sustainability, and efficiency. The process to rectify these losses begins with a culture of accountability and safety automatically reinforced by an effective artificial intelligence tool, such as Synaptic Aviation.

The Dollar Cost of Airport Ramp Accidents

According to data compiled from several international airlines, the Flight Safety Foundation estimates that 27,000 ramp accidents and incidents occur globally each year. That amounts to one safety incident per 1,000 flights. The consequence of these incidents is airlines losing a whopping $10 billion per year. Much of these costs are related to flight cancellations, schedule disruptions, and maintenance costs, but they also incorporate medical expenses for worker injuries.

The largest concern is that many of these incidents do not meet the deductible threshold for insurance, which requires airlines to account for these costs out of pocket.

What Causes Ground Accidents?

To begin solving this issue, we must first determine the root causes behind these incidents. While the general cause tends to be human error, we have found that there are several specific factors that lead to airport ramp accidents:

• Violating ground safety procedures
• Disregarding worker fatigue
• Inadequate worker training
• High turnover rates for staff

Ramps contain a complex flurry of activity within a limited amount of space. Ground staff teams need to supply fuel, unload baggage, move cargo, and perform maintenance on aircraft in the same area.

While flight schedules often contain padding to try to account for delays, many delays occur due to preventable causes—and not solely due to uncontrollable factors, such as weather. A new approach is necessary: ground teams require more communication and accountability to get flights out on time. With this approach in mind, you can eliminate delays and become more efficient in your operations without the need to add bulk to your schedules.

How Does AI Mitigate Human Error?

Our Ramp Operations Optimization Tool (ROOT) covers several bases when it comes to preventing airport ramp accidents.

Track Unsafe Ground Crew Behaviors

Many unsafe behaviors result from worker fatigue. That is why AI acts as an additional pair of eyes to correct dangerous activities. From missing safety cones to FOD walks not conducted, our AI sends real-time alerts to team members and prompts them to correct their actions.

Promote Safe Aircraft Maneuvers

Many accidents occur due to aircrafts striking personnel or other objects on the ground, leading to injuries and airplane damage. Our AI tool can detect ramp obstacles and verify the presence of guide crews to promote safe aircraft driving. 

Valuable Crew Training

From arrival to departure, our computer vision technology captures details that are easy for ground crews to miss. Our AI cameras log events and record high-definition videos that get sent to a searchable database. Quickly and easily find videos to train your ground personnel and introduce a culture of safety.

Request a Demo Today

Resolving the root cause of your airport ramp accidents may seem complex, especially due to fast-paced work environments. Fortunately, our Ramp Operations Optimization Tool (ROOT) is easy to incorporate into your daily work schedules, largely because of its automated nature. Let us show you how simple and effective it can be to implement. Request a demo at synapticaviation.com or contact us at 844-505-4496.

While this assertion may appear counterintuitive, operating a plane in the air is now much safer than operating one on the ground. Over the past decade, U.S. airlines have flown over eight billion passengers with no fatal crashes and only one passenger death. We have seen airlines report more incidents on the ground than in the air—when an aircraft is on a runway or taxiway, it is more prone to human error or incidents. The key to safety improvement in the aviation industry has been to extract relevant data and deliver it in real-time to the right parties. With this in mind, AI in airports may be useful to analyze ground operations data and alert crew members to take immediate action.

Why Are Flight Operations Consistently Getting Safer?

It is of the utmost importance to ensure passenger and pilot safety to prevent loss of life. Additionally, fatal crashes can cost over a billion dollars in damage and insurance consequences. This also includes the damage to an airline’s reputation, which leads to less business and less revenue.

The airline safety revolution propelled many of the changes that improved flight safety. Federal regulators, airline executives, and pilot union leaders collaborated to launch safety programs that would collect data, and pinpoint hazards that cause malfunctions, mistakes, and crashes. Pilots, airline carriers, and government representatives shared or received data on pilot errors and potential crashes. This exchange came with the expectation that pilots and airlines would not face disciplinary action for handing over this information.

In fact, they were rewarded for sharing mistakes—and punished for withholding errors. This served to create a culture of accountability and safety without fear of retribution.

By combing through massive amounts of data, experts were able to pinpoint error patterns that continued to repeat over and over again. These patterns became necessary safety lessons that pilots and airline crews voluntarily incorporated into their new solutions.

One of the most important facets of the situation is that airlines made voluntary changes, which proved to be much more effective than enforcing government regulations.

Another important piece to consider is that applicable data proved essential to spotting these patterns. While the industry may experience data overload, extricating relevant information from the big data available makes a sizable difference in preventing incidents.

How Can We Apply These Methods to Ground Operations?

As a similar method, AI in airports can function as a data collection method that helps improve the safety of ramp operations. An artificial intelligence tool can send proactive alerts to members across a variety of different ground support crews and third parties, who must work together in sync. While it is easy for these parties to become disjointed, this advanced solution ensures that all crews are all on the same page when it comes to safety. It can help prevent:

• Dangerous driving maneuvers around an aircraft still on the ground
• Incorrect placement of safety cones
• Non-compliance with safety vest regulations
• Other unsafe situations that compromise aircraft safety

An AI tool with computer vision technology can take in the vast amounts of data that come from analyzing the crews and processes on the ground. The more data your tool takes in, the better it becomes at optimizing your operations.

Request a Demo and See Our AI in Airports Like Yours

In collaboration with airlines, Synaptic Aviation tools can collect useful information from vast amounts of data and send real-time alerts to relevant parties, providing airlines with unmatched smart data analytics to improve aircraft safety on the ground.

Are you ready to test an AI solution? Let Synaptic Aviation show you how simple and effective it can be to implement. Request a demo today at www.synapticaviation.com or contact us at 844-505-4496.