After the outbreak of the new crown epidemic, airlines have been facing problems such as bad weather, a decrease in air traffic controllers, and a shortage of pilots, which has led to an unprecedented increase in the number of flight cancellations in 2022. According to Reuters , more than 100,000 flights in the United States were cancelled from January to July this year, an increase of 11% from before the epidemic.
As the world's largest airline, American Airlines (American Airlines2) is turning to using data and analytics to minimize disruptions and simplify operations, aiming to provide passengers with a smoother experience.
American Airlines Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer Maya Leibman
The outgoing executive vice president and Chief Information Officer Maya "Contactless, seamless, pressure-free, and it's been our vision, but the systems and infrastructure we have left behind are hard to achieve. As we start to modernize, we're taking ever greater and greater steps towards that vision. In the future, maybe the airport will become Sky-Stops, just like a regular bus station, without much effort, you just need to arrive and board the plane."
Leibman stepped down on September 1 this year, succeeding Ganesh Jayaram, executive vice president and chief digital and information officer (CDIO), who is responsible for driving the 86-year-old airline to make a major transformation to enable data-driven decision-making.
"We have been on the transformation journey for several years. Before the outbreak, we implemented product-based thinking and reorganized around newly developed products, which is a huge change for our team. However, it is precisely because our product-oriented DevOps corporate culture laid the foundation for 2019 that we were able to adjust our work priorities and re-prioritize our passenger issues quickly, such as making it easier for passengers to use travel points generated by flight cancellations."
Leibman pointed out that American Airlines operates 24 hours a day, and there are planes flying all over the world.
"We are in an industry where products are consumed during the production process. The biggest challenge is to convert this data into actionable insights, allowing us to take action in real time easily and seamlessly in this year-round environment."
Step into the cloud
Fortunately, Leibman has a trump card. Poonam Mohan, vice president of corporate technology at American Airlines, is responsible for supervising many of the company's artificial intelligence and data analysis programs, laying the foundation for Leibman to realize his vision.
"We migrated the main data platform to the cloud and deployed data centers to support customers and operations. These systems can use a lot of large real-time data from the world's largest airline. Not only can we understand how past events affect the company, but we can also improve customer and operational outcomes when the event occurs."
Mohan noted that her team also created DataOps frameworks that strengthen the company's ability to acquire and use new data, and take only hours instead of weeks.
American Airlines is also working with Microsoft to use Azure as the preferred cloud platform for applications and critical workloads. Microsoft applies artificial intelligence, machine learning and data analytics to every aspect of American airline operations, from reducing taxi time (saving thousands of gallons of jet fuel per year and giving passengers extra time to their next flight) to truly real-time information for maintenance personnel, ground crews, pilots, flight attendants and gate agents.
"When the epidemic first started, due to the implementation of the travel ban, we suddenly had to cancel thousands of flights, so we made a large amount of refunds to passengers who canceled their travel plans due to the epidemic.Customer service representatives have to deal with incredible amounts of refunds, so we used machine learning , automatic ingestion and processing to help us deliver passenger refunds more quickly,” Mohan said.
In terms of taxi time, American Airlines’ Dallas-Fort Worth Airport (DFW) hub deploys smart boarding gate programs that can provide real-time analysis of data points, such as route and runway information, automatically allocate the nearest available boarding gate to arriving aircraft, reducing the manual participation of boarding gate planners, and shortening the taxi time per day by 10 hours.
American Airlines is moving and centralizing their strategic operational workloads, including data warehouses and several legacy applications, to an operation center on Azure, which is said to help save costs, increase efficiency and scalability, and move towards the sustainability goals. “We focus on automation in various functions of the company, such as robotic process automation, enables us to automate a large number of repetitive manual processes such as finance, customer loyalty, revenue management, booking and human resources, and in addition, combining automation with machine learning for natural language processing is very effective in helping solve many customer-facing problems. "
The importance of corporate culture
Mohan also pointed out that American Airlines is currently just starting out in digital twins and artificial intelligence to help operate and enhance customer travel experience. Two machine learning projects launched this spring include HEAT (Hub Efficiency Analytics Tool) and the aforementioned smart gate project. The
HEAT project has played an important role in severe thunderstorms. The tool can analyze multiple data points including weather conditions, load rates, customer connections, gate availability and Air Traffic Control situation, helping American Airlines coordinate departure and arrival times for hundreds of flights.
Mohan said: "We are satisfied with the results we have achieved so far because the project reduces the number of flight cancellations during weather events, and while customers may delay, we are able to deliver them to their destination instead of canceling their flights. ”
As for the DFW smart gate project, Mohan said that in March this year, American Airlines was able to save nearly two minutes of taxiing time for each flight, totaling 10 hours a day.
She said: “We have reduced the situation of separating the hatch for more than 25 minutes by 50%, which is directly related to many scenarios we have to deal with: for example, our flight actually arrived early, but we were waiting on the apron for the gate to be cleaned. Separating the time between the departure of the previous flight and the arrival of the next flight can reduce this anxiety-prone situation. "
Mohan said the project also helped them reduce the number of "close" gate changes by 50%, which is especially annoying for passengers who have to rush to change gates.
In order to promote these changes across the IT department and the company, the right corporate culture needs to be established and maintained. Leibma n noted that she has an entire team dedicated to the delivery transformation within the company, whose main focus is to build a corporate culture around continuous learning and to enable business partners to adopt DevOps and product-based practices. Within the company, they developed an immersive training environment called "Hangar" to create space for product teams to work closely with the training.
"We are also building a "Developer" called Developer. Runway’s developer experience platform, creating a frictionless experience for our developers to build and deliver applications. ”
The platform allows teams to build and publicize their services, the entire technical organization uses the Runway platform directly, and then the developer community can leverage the content exposed on the platform to simplify their delivery experience.
"The difficulty facing big businesses is that people like consistency, standardity and predictability, so all kinds of processes are built around them, like a fence that hinders innovation. We cannot recruit employees but limit them to a small circle, so that they can never achieve the purpose we need to recruit them. As leaders, we need to have the judgment to understand this, that is, although we need standardity and consistency, we cannot at the expense of people's best imagination and creating new and innovative methods - not just about what we are doing, but also how we do things.
