Requirements

Air Canada required full situational awareness of the turnaround process to reduce turnaround times and improve resilience while decreasing delays for its passengers. They needed real-time visibility of all turnaround events to provide a single source of truth for their turnaround managers. This ensured on-time performance while maintaining safety standards and reducing their environmental impact. 

Toronto Pearson International Airport provided access to Assaia’s TurnaroundControl solution to help the airline reduce delays, minimize ground time, and maximize gate capacity utilization.

Solution

Assaia's TurnaroundControl uses a combination of AI and computer vision to track exactly what happens during aircraft turnaround in real-time. The resulting data highlights when turnaround subprocesses (like fueling or catering) are falling behind schedule. As a result, mitigative action can be taken immediately to minimize delays and increase gate availability.

Deviations from schedule and predicted delays are communicated to users via TurnaroundControl’s alerting capability. This reduces alert fatigue amongst teams, allowing users to rely on the solution to flag delays, focusing their efforts on particular flights rather than monitoring all ongoing departures constantly. This method of management by exception means Air Canada can manage more flights with the same number of staff. 

During an initial usage period of three months, a subset of all flights were actively managed via Assaia’s TurnaroundControl solution with turnaround managers observing and responding to alerts as they came in. Real-time information about turnaround issues and delays were previously not available.  Now, turnaround managers can respond more efficiently and minimize the effect of these issues on the on-time performance of the flight. The measured benefit, an average 3.4 minutes reduction in ground delays, represents massive savings for the airline. The potential savings of $3.9 million once all flights are managed via TurnaroundControl is even more impressive.