How Data Analytics Make Airlines Fly
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Mark Feffer started as a videotape editor back when there was videotape to edit, then joined the news desk at Dow Jones News/Retrieval, the company‘s first online product. He produced The Wall Street Journal’s first multimedia CD-ROMs and published his novel, “September,” in 2006. He lives in Pennsylvania with his wife, their fierce terrier, and a schnauzer who wonders why she ever left California. He’s a member of the Project Management Institute.
Look up at the sky and think in numbers: Each day, nearly 7,000 commercial aircraft take off on 24,000 flights, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. With the expert guidance of 14,000 air traffic controllers, they fly about 2.2 million passengers every 24 hours.
To do that, airlines and controllers coordinate airplanes’ movements through internal dispatch offices and 476 control towers. Add to the mix some 200,000 general aviation aircraft traveling between more than 19,000 airports, and you can envision the logistical challenges involved in moving 719 million passengers around the U.S. each year.
It doesn’t take much to imagine the complex logistics involved in making a system of such scale work properly. While “data analytics” is a relatively new term to the mainstream, airlines have been applying such principles to the business for years, often under the phrase “operations modeling,” said Doug Gray, director of enterprise data analytics for Dallas-based Southwest Airlines.
At first, the data was used to guide decisions about fueling, crew schedules and flight itineraries. Today, analytics are used across the organization, in functions from marketing to operations, explained Gray, who’s also a member of the International Institute for Analytics’ Expert Network. “They have a significant impact on costs and profitability,” he said.
Indeed, calling real-time analytics “integral” to any airline’s success isn’t going too far. While specialists in fueling, crew scheduling, flight scheduling and other areas may have their plans laid out perfectly, their work is never immune from unexpected developments.
“Daily operations is where stuff hits the fan,” Gray observed. “You can’t predict a heart attack in-flight, or a control-tower fire.” Schedulers have only so much advance warning of bad weather. Even on the best of days, it seems an airline’s plans can only be regarded as tentative.
