Collaborating when flights are disrupted 

A research commissioned by Amadeus, an organisation which provides technology solutions across every area of the travel industry, provides useful insights and recommended solutions for the aviation community. The report is titled “Better together: rethinking how to manage disruption in aviation.” Their study brings to the fore the fact that industry leaders are well informed about what is at stake when there is a disruption to the operational performance of aviation as it goes a long way to define its public image. For aviation to become truly traveller-centric, the airport community needs to have a clear focus on how disruption is handled.

Disruption is a broad topic, says the report. The term, for the purpose of the report, cuts across day-to-day issues that may impact a single flight, to include more severe events which normally come to mind at the mention of disruption. Simply put, disruption is any thing that impacts on-time performance. An example is the Covid-19  pandemic that brought about widespread disruption across the aviation industry. The report points out that with the continued recovery by the industry from the pandemic, and with normalisation of air traffic patterns, several additional factors are contributing to on-going disruption.

Issues that came to the fore were difficulties in staff retention and recruitment. This is particularly important because the aviation industry places a lot of reliance on skilled professionals. Another is the absence of automation, decision support and collaborative platform technologies such that phone calls between the skilled employees tend to underpin disruption response.

There is also geopolitical tension as a contributing factor to disruption. The report points out that multiple high profile crises arising in recent years have made many members of the aviation community actively plan for continued geo-political instability.

Top reasons airlines are investing in disruption management capabilities are listed in their order of priority as: improving their public image, improving the passenger experience, to differentiate themselves, to improve staff morale, and, to improve costs it goes further to state. With respect to costs, it found out that 96 percent of respondents agreed that disruption results in additional costs to their airports. Indeed it results in both direct and indirect costs to the airport community.

A persistent challenge, experts pointed out, was coordinating the response of the industry to disruption. There have been several historic barriers that have slowed down the pace of change in this regard. From the perspective of airline leaders, the report listed top barriers in their order of priority, to better disruption management as: inability to cascade information within airlines, fragmented information systems within airlines, inability to understand the impact of decisions on onward plans of passengers, lack of common technology platform with stakeholders at the airport, and, lack of computerised/automated planning for rebuilding flight schedules.

Airport leaders gave their own insights to top barriers to disruption management in their order of priority as: lack of data and insights about upcoming disruption, difficulty cascading key information between stakeholders during disruption events, last minute provision of information from airlines, lack of automated planning for reallocation of resources to meet new airline schedules, manual communication channels like phone/e-mail, and, fragmented systems that provide different situational awareness to stakeholders.

The report concludes with a series of recommendations for improving disruption response such as: stakeholders should recognise the interconnectedness of aviation where different organisations work together to serve the passenger and operate the flight; as such collaboration is vital to improved disruption management.  To achieve increased collaboration, it recommends, there should be a mindset change such that the needs of passengers are placed above the commercial interests of any one service provider. Also, sharing information, it says, supports faster and better decision making to better respond to disruption and serve the traveller optimally. 

Finally it recommends that technology should be seen as an enabler rather than a panacea. So even with new AI tools, it says, technology can only deliver maximum impact when used in a collaborative manner.

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