The Hindu Business Line : Flying right

Cost reduction, as a theme, came up immediately after safety, when Giovanni Bisignani, Director General and CEO International Air Transport Association (www.iata.org) spoke at a conference in Brisbane a few weeks ago.

"The industry is in the red," he conceded. The fuel bill for the global airline industry went up from $40 billion in 2002 to $91 billion last year, and is expected to touch $112 billion this year, said Bisignani, sounding the alarm bell.

The good news, however, is that over the last four years non-fuel unit costs have decreased by 13 per cent, labour unit are down by a third, and distribution costs got slashed by 10 per cent, while in the last two years, fuel efficiency has improved by 5 per cent. Believe it or not, "Fuel efficiency improved 75 per cent over 40 years."

Useful statistics from the Association are that modern aircraft consume 3.5 litres per 100 passenger kilometres, a ratio that is better than the best cars. There are about 30-40 million flights a year on a global basis, of which about 27 million are scheduled services.

"The average flight time is 97 minutes and the average total operating cost per aircraft is about $100 per minute, based on a 737/A320 aircraft. That gives us an overall total operating cost for the industry of about $400 billion a year," is IATA-speak, cited on www.atwonline.com.

Simplifying the business will cut $6.5 billion in industry costs, assures Bisignani. He explains how: "By changing the way that people ship and travel with. Radio Frequency ID for aviation. Bar coded boarding passes. Common Use Self-Service Kiosks for check-in. Freeing freight processes of paper. And a commitment to reach 100 per cent e-ticketing by the end of 2007." A good dose of information technology can come to the rescue of the industry, in short.

It may be enlightening that 80 per cent of airline emissions are `from trips over 1,500 km,' but sadly, there seems to be `no economic alternative'. Don't despair, though, because here is something controllable: `inefficient air traffic management,' which is costing the industry 12 per cent extra in carbon-dioxide emissions, or $14 billion at current fuel prices.

"IATA has a fuel efficiency strategy involving more direct routings, improved terminal operations, less radar vectoring, more reliance on avionics, more efficient fuel management by airlines and more effective operations," offered Bisignani.

A topic of immense significance in his speech was the `Save One Minute' campaign, which has been on for some time now. The campaign is about trying and saving at least one minute of flight time for every flight operated, as Anne Paylor explains on Air Transport World (www.atwonline.com) .

But how can we save time? "New or straighter routes," reads one example on www.icao.int, the site of International Civil Aviation Organisation. Contrary to popular belief, most flights don't go the way a crow flies. There are detours, not because there are roads in airspace but because of constraints imposed by tracking systems.

A catchy map on www.environment.aero shows `route optimisation' between Frankfurt and Hong Kong that can save 30 minutes per flight.

Bisignani's speech mentions that 300 air route improvements have been carried out saving more than 6 million tonnes of CO2 emissions. He talks about `improved airspace design and procedures' and `impressive results in recent years with the redesign of South China Sea airspace.'

India, according to Bisignani, is `the promised land for aviation now'. But he cautions that we urgently need infrastructure improvements. "In addition to new airports in Bombay and Delhi, a flow management system for ATC (air traffic control) is critical. If we don't get the ATC infrastructure right - a great start at liberalisation could turn to disaster."

Flying may be less risky than crossing city roads, especially because of the support given by information that travels to and from aircraft. For example, as a page on `instrument flight rules' on http://en.wikipedia.org informs, electronic data exchanges help achieve `separation', that is, avoiding obstacles or other aircraft, even in conditions of reduced visibility.

In tracking flights, there may perhaps be lessons from dragonflies, `some of the most ancient animal species on the planet,' as described on www.princeton.edu in an article titled `Tiny transmitters allow researchers to follow flies,' by Chad Boutin.

The article is about Martin Wikelski, associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, and his team who used both aircraft and land-based equipment to track migrating dragonflies for nearly two weeks and found many similarities between bird and dragonfly migration patterns, informs Boutin.

But why fly after flies? Because they were migrating too; and `no one had ever followed them because no one could'. The first major challenge for the researchers was the design of a transmitter that was small enough.

Backed by work in `miniature power supplies for personal electronics' Sparrow Systems, an Illinois-based manufacturer of homing devices, `was able to design transmitters weighing only 300 milligrams — about a third as much as a paper clip.'

Wikelski's team then went to capture 14 green darners, `one of the 25 to 50 kinds of dragonflies thought to migrate out of the 2,500 known species'. They used `a mixture of Superglue and eyelash adhesive,' to attach the transmitters.

"Once the transmitters were attached, the team tracked the migrating flies by following them in cars and with a small airplane," narrates Boutin. "The batteries in the transmitters lasted about two weeks before giving out, but evidently none of the dragonflies were eaten by predators or lost their transmitters prematurely," Wikelski would recount.

What did the study find? That, much like songbirds studied earlier by the team, the darners too `took wing after temperatures fell two nights in a row.' Also: "Windy days kept both grounded. And if an individual travelled one day, it was unlikely to move the next."

Instinctive decision-making patterns might exist in both birds and dragonflies, postulate the researchers, but acknowledge that they have `hardly scratched the surface'.

Don't underestimate the dragonflies. "Fossil records show that dragonflies appeared on Earth about 285 million years ago, predating the first birds by about 140 million years," is a quote of Wikelski cited in the article. Thankfully, technology has answers for the recent descendants too, the flying machines that criss-cross the skies.

For example, www.java.com has a page on `Air Flight Tracking and Java Technology'. It talks about AirportMonitor, "a dynamic, interactive display of air traffic and flight information available on many airport Web sites." Another good read is Mickey McCarter's article on www.military-information-technology.com, which is about Blue Force Tracking (BFT) technology for identifying friendly forces.

"The Marines were able to confirm the identity of their fellow war-fighters using Force XXI Battle Command, Brigade-and-Below (FBCB2) over satellite links to achieve the BFT capability. The technology identified friendly forces nearby and allowed the Army and Marine units to communicate with each other through instant messaging," reads a snatch. What is BFT? Northrop Grumman, BFT's developer, is quoted in the story thus: "Ruggedised computer hardware, and software that links satellites, sensors, communications devices, vehicles, aircraft and weapons in a seamless digital network... "

If only it were possible to wire the cost consultants similarly, in their fight against flight costs.

http://IT-in-the-works.blogspot.com

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