How to Avoid Future Airline Failures: Why Modernizing Operations is Essential

In the past couple of weeks, thousands of Southwest passengers were stranded, and many more passengers experienced more flight delays and cancellations with the FAA’s NOTAM outage. Outdated technology isn’t keeping up anymore, and it hasn’t been for a while now. Southwest relies on an outdated GE product called Sky Solver, and the NOTAM outage revealed that despite investing millions of dollars into updating its systems, the FAA wasn’t able to prevent their system going down.

According to an NPR report, Mike McCormick, a former safety official at the FAA and an assistant professor at the Embry Riddle Aeronautical University commented,  

“The surprising part to me, that after years of upgrade and investment in the next generation aviation system, how one–whatever it may be–problem caused this complete failure in the system. And there should never be a single point of failure.”

THE STATE OF TECHNOLOGY IN THE AIR TRANSPORTATION SYSTEM

During historic winter storms in December 2022, many airlines were forced to delay and cancel flights. Once the weather improved, most airlines were able to begin regular flight schedules again. However, Southwest was unable to recover, and was forced to cancel almost 17,000 flights. Hundreds of thousands of passengers were stranded. 

The culprit? Sky Solver was designed to handle up to 300 scheduling changes every day. But in December, the application crashed when the volume of transactions exceeded that number, and they had to manually build flight schedules. Despite significant modifications to Sky Solver over the years, many employees were aware of the dangers of the aging application. Back in 2017, Jon Weaks, president of the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association wrote, “We call on SWA to recode Sky Solver to respect and avoid known fatigue scenarios.” 

This failure revealed to the public and politicians that the airline industry has been far too slow to take advantage of the cloud and data integration. Southwest isn’t the only company in the airline and aerospace industries that is in desperate need for a software update. We see this often, and we’re excited to see many companies in the industry realize that the time is now to leave behind technology that is putting our infrastructure at risk.

Like they say, wisdom is doing what works until it doesn’t. Technology that was designed decades ago, no matter how much money you throw at it, doesn’t last forever. Change can be difficult, but failures like these are devastating. It’s even more frustrating when there are practical, intuitive, and integrative solutions out there that can prevent these catastrophes at a fraction of the cost to keep old and outdated technology alive on the equivalent of a ventilator system.

HOW TO MODERNIZE, SAVE ON COSTS, AND INTEGRATE SEAMLESSLY

The FAA/NOTAM failure was due to someone accidentally deleting a crucial file. This simple, but common human error, is impossible to make when using updated software like Epsilon3. So how can companies make the transition before another seemingly minor mistake causes such a transportation crisis?

Modernizing technology doesn’t have to be as tedious as it once was. It’s such a different landscape than even five years ago with how far the cloud and data integration have come. Most industries have made the successful switch to cloud-based operations management, which has helped them reduce costs and risks while simultaneously scaling sustainably at unprecedented timelines. 

Epsilon3 was designed to help aerospace teams focus on what they do best, while we make sure all of your processes are streamlined and communication is in real-time and data is readily available to anyone on the team, anywhere. 

It’s no longer necessary to build expensive in-house operations software. That approach is not only outdated, but becomes a heavy burden for engineers who need more time to focus on their core projects and designs. 

A company like Southwest that is known for its low-cost fares can no longer afford the inflated costs of managing an outdated platform that requires endless upkeep and repairs.    

WHAT YOU CAN EXPECT WHEN USING MODERNIZED SOFTWARE FOR AIRLINE OPERATIONS

• Ease of coordination

Airline operations require many different teams to work and coordinate together to make sure everything works seamlessly. Epsilon3 operations software has dialed in its collaboration features to make sure everyone can clearly see what needs attention and who needs to move the project forward. Notifications can alert team members when steps are awaiting sign-off or approval, and everyone can see what everyone else has done in real time.

• Permission control

Permission control limits what people can see and do throughout the entire platform. This ensures that no one mistakenly makes changes as they view its progress. Steps cannot be completely deleted which also helps track a complete history of what has been tested when and by whom. This way, team members can have peace of mind that everything is traceable, and no one will have to carry the burden of accidentally deleting any files or steps.

• Visibility & Traceability

All team members assigned to a procedure will have access to view the progress of each step of the operation. This makes it easy for everyone to see exactly what is going on, and can give input if they see something that isn’t lining up right before dangerous and costly mistakes occur. In addition to visibility, Epsilon3 helps team with traceability as each and every step is stored for every procedure. This helps teams truly learn from and track what they’ve encountered in previous phases and missions.

• Communications

Most importantly, using modernized operations software enables and encourages better communication with all team members. Transparency and clarity not only prevent failures on any scale, but better communication helps teams become more efficient and scale at faster rates. There are significantly less questions and barriers to successful mission completions.

• Reliability

FAA air traffic controllers are still using paper flight strips to track aircraft, and they don’t expect to have all 49 major airports up to date until 2029. With all the recent delays caused by the failure of an alert system that sends safety messages to pilots and other critical players which disrupted over 11,000 flights in one day. 

It’s more common than people realize for aerospace companies to still use paper documentation as a foundational part of their operations. Paper just isn’t an option any more with modern software available and affordable.  

• Scalability

In-house and custom-built software isn’t as viable as it once was with cloud-based software widely available. Software as a service (SaaS) allows companies to scale to meet changing demand without losing as much time and money as it would have required to update specialized software. 

The companies that have made the switch to cloud-based services gain an immediate competitive advantage as they’re able to handle a growing workload with high performance needs. It’s efficient, cost-effective, and, ultimately, keeps passengers safe and happy. 

Transitioning from older software platforms to updated cloud-based operations software can begin within the first day for many companies. It’s not the behemoth change that once kept teams from upgrading. The ease, speed, accuracy, and intuitive nature of updated software is worth the switch to prevent delays, failures, headaches, and preserve a company’s reputation.