Frontiers in Aviation by B.Vinod

The global Travel and Tourism industry’s total contribution to global gross domestic product (GDP) was $7.2 trillion, or 7.6% in 2022. This is more than double the size of the automotive manufacturing industry (US $2.86 trillion or 3%) and even larger than the chemical industry which touches every good-producing sector (US $5.7 trillion in 2022). As a fundamental cornerstone of travel and tourism, the aviation industry contributes $3.5 trillion (4.1%) of the world’s GDP.

Several organizations played key roles in formulating policy, regulations, safety, and messaging standards to scale the fledgling airline industry from the 1940s to what it is today. The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) was established in 1944 at the Chicago conference. The International Air Transport Association (IATA) was first established in 1919 and re-established in 1945 after the Second Word War. Other major organizations are the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) for efficient aerospace management and the Department of Transportation (DOT) that was the successor organization to the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB).

Schedule and fare aggregators also play an important role in facilitating booking a flight. From the early days of commercial aviation, innovation and technology have always played an important role. Examples are the first automated reservations systems in the early 1960s, the creation of the global distribution systems to automate travel agency bookings in 1976, the launch of frequent flyer programs and creation of revenue management in the early 1980s to advanced schedule profitability, fleet assignment, crew planning, and managing aircraft movement, maintenance, and aircraft utilization the 1990s.

Airline deregulation in 1978 played a key role in ensuring an era of competitiveness in all aspects of airline planning and airline operations inclusive of recovery from irregular operations. The advanced models were powered by operations research techniques, which are methods to solve complex problems with a large number of decision variables. Over the past decade, there has been ground swell of support to embrace key concepts from artificial intelligence and its three primary components – machine learning, deep learning, and natural language processing. These techniques complement the operations research models to support a greater level of automation. Robotic process automation, cognitive insight and cognitive engagement play important roles in facilitating a traveler’s flight search and booking process.

In the charter industry, many of these operations research techniques complemented with artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing play a role in?facilitating charter flight shopping and booking processes and automate mundane tasks post- departure such as expense management. Factors that may play a role include text parsing to recommend flights from an email request, consumer preferences, price sensitivity, dynamic continuous pricing, and selecting the best flight for the mission.

Dynamic repositioning of aircraft for fulfillment of booking requests and floating fleet operations are examples of automation for profitable operations. The floating fleet problem is unique to the charter industry which requires a risk-sensitive price quote and fulfillment of the booking request on the day of departure.

?If you would like to know more about how Charter and Go plans to stay on the forefront of the air travel industry give us a?call to see what we are doing.

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