Optimizing Predictive Management For Airlines

As the chief operating  officer of the company,  what are the different  kinds of trends or  challenges that you see  in the aviation space  today? If you could  give me a viewpoint of,  where do you see the  industry today in terms  of the different things  that are changing, really  give me an industry  snapshot there. 

Okay, so I would mention two main challenges. The one, which I hope is already finished, or will finish very soon is the COVID crisis, which has a streak in the whole sector. And, and the second one is the environment challenge, which was already growing before the COVID crisis, but I think that the COVID crisis by provoking a general stoppage of aviation has shown how the world could be without aviation. The good points and the negative points. So, those are the two challenges that we have to face, there is no choice and at the same time, we have to run a business on a daily basis, but also, we have to think about the way to move forward and to improve our operations and modernize our fleet. So, this is something that Corsair has been doing, even during the COVID crisis. So, I don’t know if you’ve seen our recent fleet, but we have introduced five to 13 Neos. So, we currently fly nine aircrafts, five Neos and five, ASP 30 Classic. And we won’t stop there. But we have already started what we call the second phase of fleet renewal, where we will replace before existing four additional Neos to get to a full a new fleet by October 2024. So, all the fleet renewal initiative, is a way to strongly respond to the environmental challenge, because we’ve been working on improving operational procedures, like green procedures. And we’ve already spent at least 15 years in the process. So, we started very early, even before the airframer, Airbus introduced those procedures into the official manuals. So, we were quite innovative. But I mean, the strongest way to respond to the environmental challenge is by replacing aircraft with new technology, so that we can achieve a huge amount of fuel economy, we can talk about something like 25% improvement in fuel consumption, and emissions have a nice result in yield compared to the previous generation of aircraft. And of course, we are also reducing the noise impact that we have on the environment and not forget that aspect too. And, as I said, doing this kind of project in an environment, which is a crisis environment, like the COVID crisis, it’s not easy, because you need to finance new technology, and you need to bring a lot of disruptive change to the industry, while the industry is suffering from an economical point of view. So, we’ve been doing it since two years, we move on, and we will target the end of the second phase by October 2024, where we will have one of the youngest fleets in the world. So, we already quite proud of it.

I would like to understand that there were certain kinds of trends that were trying to pick up pace before COVID as well, but probably COVID either halted it or accelerated those. So, in both cases, what are the new trends that you see in space today? If you could give examples of a few kinds of technology trends that you?

Yeah, well, when we talk about improving the way we operate our fleet, the arrival of big data, of artificial intelligence is one example where basically, we see a pragmatic improvement. Just to mention an example, we have been already introduced the usage of predictive maintenance. So basically, we don’t wait for the failure to come and then repair it. But we can predict the failure before it really happens. This is already a reality in Corsair, because we have introduced Skywise, which is a platform developed by Airbus and Palantir. We can collect a lot of data and look forward and basically estimate how the operations are going to fly by flight. 

And, it’s a saving in terms of our cost of maintenance, but it’s also a big saving in terms of passenger disruption, for example. So, it’s really improving our fleet performance. All the data treatment as a strong contribution also to the environmental impact.

Because the more we optimize the way we operate our aircraft, the less we consume fuel and the lower we emit. So that’s something which is done on a flight-by-flight basis, we have a dedicated team which can analyze all the data and use it as a decision maker. Of course, I would say the second example that I would mention to tackle the environmental challenge that we face is the introduction of sustainable aviation fuels. So, we have started doing it. And we want to fix basically, a path to improve more and more the percentage of usage of sustainable aviation fuel compared to the traditional ones. The challenge that we face today is more related to the cost of sustainable aviation fuels, because they can they can be four or five times more expensive than traditional ones. And I think that currently, the industry is transmitting that cost to airlines. So, we should have a more global project on how to introduce more and more sustainable aviation fuels in a way that it is sustainable for the airlines, because we would not be able to transfer all those extra costs to the passenger ticket price.

There’s also a trend that I came across is how they deal with their fleet, and that is to decrease the aircraft on ground. And one way to do it is like, if you are using predictive maintenance or utilizing the big data to ensure constant maintenance, and that no aircraft is staying on ground for a long time. So, in terms of your company, when you’re managing the fleet, how do you optimize these processes? And do you really leverage the predictive maintenance to help optimize the services that you offer and maintain the fleet?

"The Development Of  Big Data And Artificial  Intelligence (Ai) Has  Seen A Pragmatic  Improvement In The  Way We Operate Our  Fleet. We Have Been  Introduced To The  Usage Of Predictive  Maintenance So That  We Can Predict And  Repair Any Failure  Before It Happens" 

Okay, yes, well, I can tell you that we have some specific figures, if you want to be to be shared on these because first of all, we operate long haul operations. So, as you said, keeping the aircraft in flight as long as possible, it’s a very important goal. Dispatch reliability. So basically, a very important indicator of our maintenance performance is already very high in our airline, it goes beyond 99 percent. So, from a technical point of view, we are working on the last part of the objective, which is pushing the number to something very close to 100%, which was very tough when we were in a classic technique of reactive maintenance. With the predictive, we have already saved us something like five events where the aircraft would have been stopped in the last year. So, it’s something that we can count easily. And we can measure, because we see exactly the time of the failure, which was going to occur, for example, in the fuel pump, and we can exactly say that it would have costed us a grounded aircraft. So, I think that kind of tool is key to achieve an extremely high level of dispatch reliability. And I would say also, when you want to finance, recent technology, like the ACE research, you need to push the aircraft utilization very high. And when I say very high, it’s something like more than 5000 hours per year per aircraft, which then is a necessary step to, let’s say, solve the economical equation. So, and reach profitability and sustainability for the airline at the end of the day.

Yeah, okay. SoI would just have one final question for you. And this would be more or in terms of providing your advice to the other senior leaders or other CIOs. CXOs. Reading this draft as to what you think they should be looking at when they are trying to go through a kind of transformation in their own company to build a new kind of processes to optimize their services or bring new kinds of methods to improve or leverage new kinds of digital technologies, what would be some of the rules that you would like to inform them, like they should keep in mind when they are undertaking any kind of new project as such?

Yeah, okay. So, what first of all, our industry is an industry where safety is the priority. So, any change that we introduce into our processes, must be proven to be safe, and must be proven to be compliant with regulation. So, speed is not always your friend. And to fix pragmatic objectives in a way that for example, the change or the new technology that you are introducing is, let’s say, adopted by the customers internal or external. The second one, I would say that, because we are dealing with managing change, resource and human capital of the company is very important. And there are some jobs which are currently evolving, if you see the new organization like the traditional one, I think that’s not the good approach. If I mentioned the example of big data, it means that the typical IT guy, and the typical operations guy will probably want to be one and only person in the future. So, you need to have people with a lot of cross skills, which do not simply stick to their traditional domain, but which are eager to also evolve in terms of the skills and the proficiencies that they have. So that’s a key point. And we see that into our organization. If I may mention one example. In the typical engineering and maintenance organization that we have, now we have a data scientist, which is fully dedicated to a campaigning all the colleagues in the technology improvement that we are achieving through the introduction of new IT tools, for example, and which of course will work with the IT department, which is an important part of the airline. And then you need people which are very open minded, which can look forward and anticipate the new challenges. If I mentioned the environmental challenge, we think it is a crucial objective. And we will not adopt, let’s say the speech consisting in saying that, okay, we are just one 3% on the industry, overall, worthwhile industry. So go and see the others before talking to us. No, I mean, we have an important contribution. And so, we need, we need to be innovative and take full responsibility for our contribution.