ADF's Vision of the Airline Industry in the 21st Century

As the pace of technology accelerates, and the airline industry sees increasing consolidation, competition, rising costs and decreasing margins, ADF believes carriers must become adept at integrating mission-critical data from both flight operations and ground operations. Data needed for real-time decision-making will be gathered, fused and distributed via a unified data repository integrated with mobile devices such as handheld PDAs and cockpit-mounted EFBs.

ADF views the aircraft as a mobile node on the enterprise network, which both provides and makes use of data that can enable faster and better-informed operational decisions in areas such as:

Scheduling
Flight planning
Load planning
Weight and balance
Fuel management
Takeoff and Landing Performance

On-Demand Documenatation
Dispatch
Crewcomm
Security
Image capture
Distance Learning

Benefits are derived from:

Real time access to mission critical information
Improved task management and decision support tools

Reduced infrastructure
Reduced cycle times
Increased productivity
More efficient flight paths

Key Trends and Drivers

Airline consolidation

As airline management teams engage in restructuring their organizations to meet ever-changing market demands, they need access to flexible, best-of-breed technology and software. To do this, airlines are increasingly looking at solutions such as licensing hosted software for non-core business applications.

Lean-operations for airlines

Lean operations in the airline industry are beginning to gain recognition and acceptance. Three annual industry forums have been held to view concepts and flush out definitions. The single most important aspect of achieving lean-operations in the airline industry is connecting the aircraft to the business operations as a node on the Enterprise Network.

Aircraft/operations data

Collection, distribution and analysis of aircraft/operations data are essential in meeting regulatory and business requirements. The use of Decision Support Tools is an effective way to ensure consistency and timely execution and generate timely operations data.

Digital Communications

Airline performance is measured by on-time departure. Digital communications are increasingly being adopted to mitigate the effect of poor communications and labor intensive processes that need to be completed just prior to depature time, thus increasing both employee stress and the likelihood for errors that could impact operations safety.