Operations Update
Vivian is the Head of Sales - Asia for CAE Flight Operations Solutions and focuses on helping airlines harness the power of technology to improve operational performance, profitability and passenger experience. Vivian spent the past decade working with multiple start-ups and establishing airlines across the globe to introduce digitization within their ops, crew, dispatch, maintenance & engineering functions. He was previously the Sales Leader - Asia & Eastern Europe with Merlot Aero, an airline crew operations and optimization software company prior to which he held business development roles at Laminaar Aviation Infotech, Solutions Aero & ENGRAV Systems. Vivian holds a Bachelor of Engineering in Aircraft & Rocket Design from National Aerospace University, Ukraine.
Transcript
Vivian:Welcome to Kuala Lumpur. Welcome to CAPA. My name is Vivian Bezosa. I am the Head of CAE's Flight Operations Solutions Sales in the Asia region. It's a pleasure to speak to this esteemed group over here, and I plan to take the next 10 minutes to talk to you about the future of airline operations. Talking about our learnings from the past couple of years, what we believe is going to happen in the next 30 years, and what CAE has been doing to be at the forefront of this innovation. CAE's Flight Operations Solutions— now that's a portfolio that spans operations control, crew management, flight dispatch, airport, and in-flight, taking care of ground handling, and gate and staff management. Now, we touch the major focal points of the airline operation industry. Today, we support over 150 airlines across the world. To give you an idea of the length and breadth of who we work with, we create about 22,000 flight plans every day. We touch about 200,000 pilot and cabin crew on a day-to-day basis. We track over 140,000 flights on a daily basis and manage over 7,000 aircraft. In, in a nutshell, somewhere across the world there is a flight powered by our solutions taking off every 5 seconds. Now, the pandemic, it came out of nowhere, and when it hit We never had any idea of how long it's going to be around. There were various assumptions that it might pass in a couple of months. It's going to be restricted to a small section of the globe only. But the scale at which it hit all of us and the duration was unimaginable. Now, what did happen is that as a result of this uncertainty, there were a couple of moving factors and moving pieces that came to play. There were a whole bunch of issues that the airline industry anticipated to happen much later, which were brought forward. And the pandemic also threw light on a whole bunch of issues that we never anticipated at all. The operational environment. Now, many people had left the industry in search of other jobs. Many people who were reaching the end of their tenure in the industry had exited the industry and taken early retirement. And this left a huge institutional knowledge loss. The other one is delayed modernization. While the airlines were fighting to keep the lights on, everything else became second priority. And that includes infrastructure, IT, and technology modernization. And then there's the operational environment. And that's something that continues until today. Border closures, restrictions, travel bubbles. And then we have to deal with things like geopolitical issues that we have today and the climate and what Mother Nature throws at us from time to time. All this together put the airlines and the other industries in the aviation world in a very tight squeeze for budget. And this has led to and continues in a way to lead to budget constraints. Now, taking a look at the technology front, Over the last 30 years, while the airline industry has incorporated IT into their, you know, into their day-to-day activities, it has always taken a very long time to actually adopt these. This led to certain challenges that— sorry, this led to certain challenges that again came into play and were amplified during the COVID time. Now, the other thing is Many of the processes in IT were primarily driven by business and not the other way around. IT was never used to drive the business to excel. We can see, we can see that even today, operations are still more or less run in the same way over the last 3 decades. However, with the rapid pace at which technology is advancing, things have changed a lot. For one, uncertainty persists in the operational environment, and as airlines, we have all accepted this. And that's where technology comes to the rescue to help you drive and take those decisions to recover at a quicker pace. The airlines have also agreed, and the airports have also agreed that a flexible approach is required. And again, technology to the rescue rather than, rather than depending on the siloed experience and skill set of people. You now have access to decision-driven support systems. Now, the other thing and what primarily has led to this is the fact that technology today is far more advanced and superior to what was available over the last 30 years. Cloud services—most airlines have accepted that this is the way to go. Reduced infrastructure cost. Higher security, larger scalability, access from everywhere. The service-driven model where the airlines are now accepting that, you know, let's focus on keeping our passengers and aircraft in the air and let's leave the IT to the experts. Then you have the modular approach where the airlines have the option to pick and choose only what they require. Now all this is driven by a highly user experience-driven design where we keep the end user in mind. Finally, we have 2 very, very important things: intelligent automation driven by data integration, which again brings those silos that have traditionally worked as separate pillars not talking to each other together. What we anticipate is going to happen, there's going to be a better balance between technology and human, which means that the human aspect of the operation is going to heavily rely on the tech— on technology to drive drive it. Breaking down of silos— when technology comes in, the various departments talk to each other and the silos are not going to be there. And this will enable better real-time decision-making, leading to seamless disruption management. And lastly, the airlines have also become more open to continuously learning and adoption of the latest technology. Now we've incorporated AI and ML, 2 buzzwords that is used explicitly and a lot today, into every aspect of what we do. Like I said, our solutions touch various facets of the industry and across operations control, across crew management, across flight management, the airport, and the in-flight and training. We have heavily leveraged this to help improve predictability in terms of future planning, management of day-of-operations disruption, and also to use all the data that we have to help future decision-making. At CAE, our goal is to be the market leader, and for that, we have invested significantly. Over the last 5 years, we've acquired a couple of businesses from various parts of the world and brought them together under one umbrella called Flight Operations Solutions. Over the past 18 months, we've worked with our existing customers and a couple of non-customer airlines to understand what the airline and what the industry wants. Just this week, we had our Asia-Pacific User Summit where we had over 70 airlines in participation and we unveiled the unified disruption management technology, something that helps the airline on a single pane of glass take a decision considering all the various operational aspects. Now, before I conclude, let me leave you with some numbers because it's not just about technology, it's also how we help the world and how we help the environment. Now, a flight on, on an average sector length, uses about 5,000 kilos of fuel, and per carrier on average wastes about 4,000 meals a day. Our solution helps airlines, and this is based on our studies from one of our customers, save 0.75% of fuel. Now, it's not a big amount when you look at one aircraft, but the numbers add up. To give you an example of what that leads to is that on an annual basis for a fleet of 50 aircraft, that's about 3.8 million kilograms of fuel. That's enough fuel to fuel— that's enough fuel for 37,000 SUVs. The other one is catering. Again, 15% of 4,000 meals a day for a carrier may not feel significant, but if you take that at larger global scale, that's on average 500 million meals wasted. In a world like today where poverty and starvation are big, that could feed close to half a million people 3 meals a day for an entire year. So with that, I would like to conclude my presentation on the airline operations part. Thank you very much for your attention.
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