Gatwick Airport CIO outlines how analytics can improve flight delays

Cathal Corcoran, Gatwick Airport CIO, also discusses how data can help to sell more whisky

Gatwick Airport is leveraging data in an attempt to improve the speed with which is ‘turns around' aircraft - unloading passengers and baggage, refueling, reloading and getting the plane back into the air for its next journey.

Cathal Corcoran, Gatwick Airport's CIO, told Computing that his organisation is using sensors to gather more data to help drive this improvement.

"We're trying to turn aircraft around in thirty minutes," Corcoran began. "Typically you can't turn them around faster. We're putting sensors on everything, and taking the information produced back to our data analytics solutions.

The airport uses Axon AI, a small company which Corcoran states can produce accuracy levels that are significantly more accurate than a human, using just 12 months' worth of data.

"We'll enrich that with the data we get from our sensors, then feed that into our big data analytics solution. That will make us better at predicting our capacity to turn a plane around. The control tower plans on what the analytics system tells it, and pilots schedule the plane to leave at that predicted time.

"Say a plane's coming in late, you want to be able to make that time up. So you want to be able to use a combination of people, processes and technology to help get that plane turned quickly. We now have technology more accurately forecasting what we can do. Can we reschedule that plane going out and avoid delays? Can we get it into the airspace more quickly, and minimise the impact on outbound passengers?

"The accuracy levels we're seeing in the MVP [Minimum Viable Product] phase are encouraging. We'll run the new technology in parallel with the standard process for the next six to twelve months before switching, and deciding to trust what the computer tells us. The early signs are very encouraging," he added.

Corcoran also described the airport's use of data to understand the flow of passengers around the airport, and how that can affect shopping opportunities.

"We're taking on technology from the retail world, a company called Aisle Labs, which helps us to understand the flow of passengers from the curb to the gate. Where do they dwell, do they turn left or right when the walk in? We use technology which hooks into our Aruba WiFi data and starts to understand where people go, did they stop at a particular place or not? We then hook that into our POS [Point of Sale] data.

"That leads to understandings like the fact that Canadians and Chinese love Scottish whisky. So when we know there's are planes flying out to Canada and China, we put a guy in a kilt outside the whisky shop and suddenly it'll sell a lot more. So we then share that information with retailers. The data science and algorithms that sit behind all this have been proven out in over shopping malls across the globe," he said.

But is this technology compliant, given its ability to track individuals?

"It's all built using GDPR complaint technology," Corcoran explained. "It uses anonymised MAC addresses," he concluded.

Corcoran also told Computing that the airport is looking into technology which can help bolster security by measuring brain waves.