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The road to operational excellence:
Optimizing aircraft turnaround with AI-powered video analytics

Debabrate Ray

Introduction

The dynamic landscape of the aviation sector seeks better passenger experience, operational excellence and absolute safety. Delay in turnaround operations costs the airline industry billions of dollars each year. Technologies like AI/ML have forayed in as a savior, optimizing aircraft turnaround operations to the tee, and making each flight successful – it’s a win win.

As per Boeing, if you were to reduce the average turn-time of a point-to-point carrier from 40 to 30 minutes, it would increase aircraft utilization by 8.1%, scaling from 2,304 trips per year to 2,491 trips annually.

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Metamorphosis of aircraft turnaround operations: Harnessing AI-enabled video analytics

The turnaround process includes an array of different activities such as positioning passenger bridges or stairs, deplaning passengers, unloading and loading of baggage and cargo, and fuelling. Video analytics provides real-time information on all of them. This way, potential delays and errors can be identified before they occur and proactive measures can be taken to counter the same.

AI-enabled video analytics is a major breakthrough in the aviation sector. By converting valuable ground-time to air-time, video analytics can help stakeholders maximize aircraft utilization, amplifying profits for airlines.

The roadmap to optimizing aircraft turnaround time

First things first, define the turnaround schedule for each flight with a set start and end time for each task, similar to a project schedule. This way, stakeholders can view different turnaround activities and monitor them effectively.

When considering actual operations, the turnaround schedule is more dynamic in nature. It needs to be adjusted based on the factors such as delay in aircraft arrival that may cause deviation from the original schedule.

A turnaround chart must feature a clearly outlined predefined critical path, which may be change over time based on the status of activities. For instance, the addition of a pit stop for fuelling to an aircraft’s original critical path due to the unavailability of the fuel track within a set time period.

Often times, airlines are unaware of the activities going on at the gate during the turnaround opertaions. Complete awareness of the tasks being performed at the gate and their status helps potential errors, and prevent delays via proactive actions – optimizing turnaround operations.

The role of AI-enabled video analytics in optimizing aircraft turnaround process

Traditionally, airlines have relied on data gathered manually from multiple standalone systems to track these activities. Unfortunately, this approach provided misleading insights and led to errors, leaving limited options for corrective measures.

Unlike manually collected data, video analytics captures all turnaround activities in real-time, turning video stream into valuable structured data, facilitating proactive mitigation of potential delays. AI-enabled video analytics leverages existing CCTV infrastructure and ML algorithms to optimize turnaround operations.
Here is how it works
  • First, video feeds from the ramp area are captured for continuously monitoring activities like fuelling, jet bridge positioning, pushback, unloading baggage or cargo, etc.
  • Then different activities are captured using video analytics with timestamps and are passed on to the decision engine
  • The feed from the video analytics engine and the pre-defined turnaround schedule are compared, and then alerts or notifications are sent based on the situation
  • These alerts/notifications are monitored to take preventive actions against potential delays

Maximize aircraft utilization, minimize turnaround time: Embrace video analytics

Tap into the multitude of possibilities AI-driven video analytics has to offer by embracing the complete spectrum of AI capabilities in the airlines industry.

We at TCG Digital take care of everything with our end-to-end AI platform tcgmcube, helping you optimize aircraft turnaround operations and maximize profits. With a next-gen video analytics solution, we are delivering excellence and experience for all – airports, passengers, and ground handlers.

To know more about our AI-powered video analytics solution, write to us at contact@tcgdigital.com