The scene plays out on Oct. 15 at New York’s LaGuardia Airport, dull, annoying and all too routine. A gate agent announces the flight to St. Louis will be delayed. The crew has to summon a new plane because of a failed part. The passengers groan resignedly. Finally, 90 minutes later, the departure.
More than 60 percent of frequent flyers cite delays among the things about air travel that they find most dismaying. And the bill for such delays? For passengers, the costs are spread around — an extra $25 in parking here, a missed business meeting there. Carriers, meanwhile, pay an estimated $62 per minute in crew, fuel, maintenance and other costs. It adds up. The Federal Aviation Administration and the research group Nextor calculated that such delays cost U.S. passengers and airlines tens of billions of dollars last year.
Most of those costs and all of the annoyance for the passengers on that flight from LaGuardia could have been avoided if the airline had been able to predict that the part was going to fail and prevent it from happening, says Karen Thomas of Teradata, a data and analytics company. By combining flight analytics and sensor data from engines with customer data, airlines can better manage flight disruptions, increase operational efficiencies and improve customer experiences, she says.
Teradata has entered a strategic partnership with GE Aviation using its asset performance management and operations data to analyze thousands of terabytes of data in real time to help airlines fly safer, protect the environment and provide a better passenger experience.
Commercial aviation today accumulates vast lakes of data each year, around 15 billion terabytes — a billion times the size of the Library of Congress. (One terabyte of data can hold 200,000 songs or 500 hours of movies.) Being able to fish out that data will open up untold avenues for problem solving.
A pair GEnx jet engines powering a Boeing 787 Dreamliner (top image) generate 1 terabyte of data per day. GIF credit: GE Reports. Top image credit: Adam Senatori for GE Reports.
Predictive maintenance is just one solution that will be available to airlines when Teradata combines its consumer and supplier analytics with GE’s data from 320 million flight hours, Thomas says. “Full flight data hasn’t been connected to customer data,” she says. “Now it is, and that can be a game changer for the aviation industry.”
The melded analytics will enable airlines to zero in on specific issues. In the past, data from GE’s Predix platform for the Industrial Internet might identify a particular wing part that failed more often than expected. The solution would be to examine every plane until all the bad parts could be found and replaced. With merged data, it will be possible to determine which supplier sold the failed parts, which planes had them and what date they were installed.
“It might turn out a supplier had a bad lot, so you only need to check the 24 planes with parts delivered on that specific day to that specific location from that particular supplier,” says Andrew Coleman, chief commercial officer for GE Aviation’s Digital Solutions business.
The partnership has benefits for long-term matters such as safety or environmental initiatives because it will make solving problems easier by crunching enormous amounts of data quickly. Coleman says problems that might have required months or years to solve now will potentially take hours or even minutes.
In addition to accessing data from Predix apps such as FlightPulse, which connects pilots to various flight metrics when they land, airlines will be able to build custom apps.
“Beyond taking the high bar of safety within aviation even higher, Qantas has already saved 8 million gallons of fuel using FlightPulse,” Coleman says. “Those two facts alone make us incredibly proud. Airlines are going to create ROI from this integrated level of insight that far exceeds our goals.”
Will more flights from LaGuardia take off on time? That’s up in the air, but if they don’t, GE and Teradata will know all about it, and so will GE Aviation’s customers.