Institutionalizing Airline Operational Dismality

Boris Johnson's COP26 comment that aviation’s sustainability ambitions are "pathetic’ and called on the sector to do better", should be a call to arms for the airline industry.

This was followed by Barack Obama's saying that, "We must muster the will to act", and that the "World has to step up", on climate change.

Unfortunately, airlines have yet to show the "will to act", "do better" or "step up" when it comes to near term self-help towards sustainability or Operational Excellence, as their sustainability and "day of" operational improvement programs are years, if not decades, into the future.

The fact is that airlines can, and should do their part NOW to reduce CO2, not years into the future, especially since it is inexpensive to accomplish and rapidly reduces delays/congestion/costs.

For example, above and beyond any current airline sustainability program, airlines can inexpensively and internally cut their Carbon Footprint an additional 5% by 2025, while also improving profits and reducing congestion.

FAA and Embry-Riddle jointly proved this (FAA Task J Report - Steve Bradford, Dr. Vitaly Guzhva and Dr. Ahmed Abdelghany), Delta Airlines proved this (Delta Checklist Publication), Georgia Tech proved this (Dr. John-Paul Clark) and GE Aviation proved this (Dubai FLOW Report).

Below is a link to an article I wrote for the Fall 2021 issue of Managing the Skies on the "institutionalization" and huge environmental/financial impact of Airline Operational Dismality (not a word, accurate description), caused by the needless variance making the airline's "day of" operation dynamically unstable (the worse it gets, the worse it gets). And the financial impact is huge at over $3 Billion annually for a single large airline. And this does not include the $10s, if not $100s of Billions in costs borne by passengers, ATC, airports and the environment.

And while many may consider Operational Dismality too harsh, what else can you say about an industry that unnecessarily, yes unnecessarily, generates so much avoidable CO2, wastes so much fuel, squanders so much capacity and so easily accepts a 30% daily defect rate (on time zero arrival or A0)?

Fortunately there is an FAA operationally validated, internal path for airlines to quickly and inexpensively move to Operational Excellence (>%5 CO2 reduction, >85% A0, <3% day to day A0 Standard Deviation, >8 minute scheduled block/gate time reduction per flight) using "day of" Big Data, predictive analytics, cloud based AI/machine learning, optimization engine to drive system focused/business based real time prescriptive actions (RTA) and the currently available airspace flexibility to internally manage the movement of their aircraft.

https://athgrp.com/_pdoc/Institutionalizing%20Operational%20Dismality%20Fall%202021.pdf

Stay safe