Artificial Intelligence isn’t ready to replace pilots, but it will simplify flight search, deliver more competitive airfares, and help airlines fly sustainably.
Airline operations are ideally suited to artificial intelligence integrations because they are complex and require processing vast oceans of data. In some cases, that complexity tests the limits of what AI and machine learning can accomplish, at least for now. But there have been recent advances that give us a good sense of what lies ahead for AI in the skies.
Personalization And Competitive Airfares
Virgin Atlantic is one airline tapping into the value proposition of AI. The airline is integrating Amperity’s AI-driven Customer 360 platform, to unify, manage, and apply its vast customer data, offering travelers a more tailored and interconnected journey.
Tom Barber, Head of Data at Virgin Atlantic, explained, “We’re building a digital core at the heart of our business so that our customers benefit from a seamless shop, book, and service experience for our flights and holidays, with an innate understanding of their preferences across the end-to-end journey.”
The airline also announced a partnership with Fetcherr, which uses AI to intelligently match fares to market conditions, for more effective airfare offers on competitive routes. Fetcherr’s Generative Pricing Engine can forecast the behavior of various market variables, allowing airlines to modify their airfare prices in real time.
Chris Wilkinson, VP of Airline Pricing and Revenue Management at Virgin Atlantic, describes it as “a major advancement in pricing technology beyond traditional segmentation, along with seamless end-to-end operational infrastructure, that will revolutionize the way we set prices.”
Other airlines capitalizing on Fetcherr’s AI-powered pricing engine include Brazil’s Azul and Royal Air Maroc.
More Effective Marketing Spend
Because of their narrow margins, airlines have to be good at controlling costs. AI can support that in various ways, including the costs to attract bookings.
Icelandair and its digital media agency, Brainlabs, have turned to Scibids for AI-enhanced digital marketing to manage the airline’s programmatic ad campaigns. As a result, the airline reports a 10-fold improvement in ROI on digital ads and a cost-per-booking reduction of 70%.
Jóhann Benediktsson, Digital Marketing Manager at Icelandair, said, “The results were incredibly fruitful.”
Improving Operations
Alaska Star Ventures, the investment arm of Alaska Airlines
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Pasha Saleh, Corporate Development Director for Alaska Airlines, said, “Our teams have already been using Assaia to improve our aircraft turn processes, and we’re thrilled to help expand technology that will make us safer, more efficient, and able to offer an even better guest experience. This partnership represents the future of machine learning applications in aviation and will translate into significant advances in our industry.”
Assaia also made significant gains in the airport sector with the recent adoption of its TurnaroundControl software by Berlin’s Brandenburg Airport.
Thomas Hoff Anderson, Chief Operations Officer at Flughafen Berlin Brandenburg GmbH, said, “An airport as an infrastructure operator contributes to a good travel experience for passengers with stable processes and reliable flight schedules. In the future, we at BER will continue to rely on an AI-based solution to increase the stability of the network and punctuality figures. We expect the software’s machine learning feature to provide us with valuable insights that will give us additional impetus to develop processes in airport operations further.”
AI Demystifies Contrails and Supports Sustainable Flights
Sustainability is a crucial target for airlines, which are eager to grow while reducing carbon emissions. Airlines recognize that many customers are now more aware of and sensitive to their travel carbon footprint and Google is eager to help.
Chief Sustainability Officer at Google
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AI can help calculate the environmental impact of flights and find optimal flight paths to reduce emissions. Google is assisting airlines to develop a new Travel Impact Model carbon footprint tracker for its flight search engine through a collaboration with the International Council on Clean Transportation and aviation stakeholders.
American Airlines partnered with Google to use AI to tackle one of aviation’s most perplexing non-carbon pollution issues. Contrails, the cirrus cloud trails aircraft leave in the sky as they fly under certain weather conditions, are still essentially an unknown sustainability factor. During the day, these clouds may reflect sunlight and help keep temperatures down. However, some research suggests that when contrails linger at nighttime, they may trap heat.
With support from American Airlines, Google Research and Breakthrough Energy conducted a study into the feasibility of identifying atmospheric zones where aircraft are most likely to produce contrails. The team then tried to determine whether they could avoid creating contrails by equipping pilots with the right atmospheric data.
To accomplish this, they processed vast data banks to create contrail forecast maps. American Airlines pilots conducted 70 flights over six months guided by AI-generated forecasts. The pilots tweaked the projected routes, minimizing the creation of contrails. When pilots used AI predictions to circumvent contrail creation, there was a 54% reduction in contrail formation, compared to flights operated without these predictions.
“Our contrails predictions combine the latest in AI research with massive amounts of satellite imagery, weather data, and flight data,” said Juliet Rothenberg, head of product for Climate AI at Google Research. “We now have the first proof point that commercial flights can use these predictions to avoid contrails, as verified in satellite imagery.”
Smart Planes Are Here, But Pilots Jobs Are Secure
Over the past few years, the aviation industry has significantly advanced smart aircraft technology. Aircraft health systems share seas of data that support predictive maintenance.
Again, Virgin Atlantic has embraced AI through a collaboration with its Maintenance and Repair Organization, Air France-KLM Engineering and Maintenance. The airline and MRO have agreed to deploy Prognos for Aircraft predictive maintenance solutions for Virgin Atlantic’s fleet of 787 aircraft.
The Prognos for Aircraft platform uses AI and Big Data technology to monitor aircraft parts and systems. The application can predict failures as early as 50 flights before they happen. These predictive models allow airlines to plan their repair or replacement operations better, avoiding aircraft grounding situations that can disrupt flights.
However, flying aircraft safely involves too many complex variables for AI to take over soon.
“We like the idea of a human having control should anything go wrong,” says Vance Hilderman, principal founder/CTO of aviation development/certification companies TekSci, HighRely, and AFuzion, and author of Aviation Development Ecosystem. “Many people have read the stories of crashes that may have involved some failure in an onboard automated system. On the other hand, some tests have shown that autopilot systems can usually perform better than human pilots in most conditions, and the technology is advancing daily. I will say, however, that the technology has a long way to go before it can completely guarantee safe flights for passengers and adhere to mandatory aviation standards.”
At the same time, autopilot systems are advancing. While fully-automated flights may not be practical or desirable, AI will do plenty over the coming decades to make air travel better.
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