Could Technology End Airline Delays?
Are you a fed up air traveler? You’re not alone. Delays and cancellations seem to have become the rule this year, but there is a better way. Technology and free markets could vastly improve air travel, if politicians will allow them to work.
It’s become popular to blame air travel woes on deregulation, just as California pundits and politicos are blaming a freer energy market for rising electric bills. In both cases, competition and free markets are unjustly taking the fall in public commentary. California eliminated some restrictions on the sale of electricity. But state government and the Feds continue to regulate energy production, while environmental groups block the creation of new power plants, which makes it difficult and costly to generate electricity. If it costs a lot to generate power, you can only squeeze so much savings out of new marketing rules.
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Aegean Airlines Choose CabinVu CDMS
Aegean Airlines, Greece’s largest airline, has chosen CabinVu in-flight security systems from AD Aerospace, an AD Group company, for fitting on a Boeing 737-400 aircraft.
The cockpit door monitoring system (CDMS) improves the security of the flight deck and the entire aircraft. It increases the pilots’ situational awareness by providing them with a clear and unrestricted view of the area outside the cockpit door and in the adjacent galleys.
“At Aegean Airlines we offer our customers a premium service and this extends to the care we take of their safety,” says Antonis Grigoriadis, avionics development engineer at Aegean Airlines. “CabinVu adds to the systems that we already have in place to ensure that our passengers and crew have a secure flight.”
Keeping the cockpit safe
CabinVu, the popular choice for cockpit door surveillance, provides pilots with a forward-looking, clear and unobstructed view of the area outside the cockpit door and in the adjacent galleys from their usual seated positions. A series of cameras are linked to either one or two monitors and associated controllers within reach of the pilots for easy and comfortable use.
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Do technology standards make sense for airlines’ attempts to differentiate?
GDS executives are calling for the development of technical standards for the booking and processing of airlines’ unbundled fares, ancillary revenue and other sales innovations.
Sabre chief Sam Gilliland raised the issue at November’s PhoCusWright conference.
But other industry players are saying, “Not so fast.”
“Standards are good, but let’s all keep in mind that this is about differentiation,” Suzanne Rubin, American Airlines’ managing director of merchandising and distribution strategy and president of AAVacations, said. “We don’t want something that puts us right back into the same box of commodity product.”
Gilliland has warned that the merchandising trend could become “e-ticketing 2.0.”
Electronic tickets made their debut in 1995. Many passengers resisted using them because if a flight was canceled, they had to stand in line to have a paper ticket issued and endorsed to another carrier.
The airlines quickly realized that e-ticket adoption would increase if that hurdle were removed, yet the first interline e-ticket agreement was not signed until 2002. It covered two airlines.
Early adoption of standards would have eased the transition to universal electronic ticketing, but some industry participants say merchandising is a different animal.
Timothy O’Neil-Dunne, managing partner of T2Impact, a business accelerator for travel distribution, said, “Airlines are saying that this is not a standardized service and should not be covered by standard rules that somebody mandates.”
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High Fuel Prices in Airline Industry is Causing Technology Innovation Advances
The goal of a business or corporation is to make a profit and to do so they must perform a desired service or make a needed or desired product that the customer or consumer is willing to impart a unit of trade for; a dollar or many dollars you see? When fuel prices go up in the transportation sector business must find ways to pass on these costs and streamline their operations to do more, carry more, more efficiently.
This subject came up recently when someone asked a moderator of an online think tank to explain. Here is the question; “Can we expect to see improvements in airline travel in regards to cost change or fuel-surcharges?”
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2009 Airline IT Trends Survey: Technology developments
Passengers using their mobile phones to check-in may be fairly thin on the ground today, but airlines are forecasting that people using this service will increase fivefold in the next three years and are gearing up to rapidly accelerate the availability of a whole range of mobile facilities, including check-in, to help their customers self-process their journey.
The growth and popularity of web and mobile services look set to overshadow kiosks as a check-in channel – indeed airlines in some regions that have yet to implement kiosks may simply leapfrog this evolutionary stage. However there is plenty of life left in the kiosk as a self-service channel, with an increasing number of airlines looking to evolve it further to provide other self-processing tools.
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