The International Air Transport Association (IATA) has urged aviation stakeholders to embrace data and digital transformation to help deliver frictionless customer experience while enhancing safety and efficiency.
“We must transform paper-based and legacy processes into digital ones and use data to drive decision-making in all facets of our business. Organizational silos will need to be shed to ensure a holistic focus on the entire customer experience. And we will need to do all this while continuing to ensure the highest levels of safety, security and environmental sustainability,” said IATA’s Director General and CEO, Alexandre de Juniac.
In his remarks delivered at the IATA Aviation Data Symposium, de Juniac focused on three building blocks to achieving success, including the need for airlines to develop core data science capabilities and use data to drive safety and operational improvement.
“The statistics tell us that despite yearly fluctuations, the long-term trend is toward improving safety. Nevertheless, we must intensify our efforts to ensure the accident rate remains disconnected from the expected doubling in air traffic demand over the next 20 years. Greater use of data will be critical to these efforts,” said de Juniac.
He cited IATA’s Global Aviation Data Management (GDM) program as an example.
“GADM captures data from more than 470 different industry participants, through accident and incident reports, ground damage occurrences and flight data. This supports a proactive data-driven approach for advanced trend analysis and predictive risk mitigation.”
De Juniac alands tresses the need for IATA’s Turbulence Aware initiative.
“Using data already being collected by aircraft systems, Turbulence Aware will help airlines avoid turbulence, resulting in a decline in turbulence-related injuries, reduced fuel burn and improved operational efficiencies,” he said.
