CASE STUDIES

CONNECTED AIRCRAFT

01. THE CHALLENGE

The leading airlines in the United States needed a better system to manage their operational data. Data sources included real-time location, flight details, publicly available airport and competitor statistics, and weather conditions. Each source had its own format and data structure; all feeding into a centralized database and interpreted by data analysts through SQL queries. There were many teams of analysts, each using different models that were neither scalable nor efficient.

02. THE PROCESS

A multidisciplinary team led by Joonik, composed of designers, coders, engineers and airline and aviation experts; collaborated to redefine the most effective use of the carriers’ data. The analysis was divided between the data sources available –every sensor, signal or data table– and the airlines’ performance and operational indicators.

Once the team agreed on the objectives, Joonik began development of the new platform. We first normalized the data to speed up processing times. Then, we developed formulas and algorithms to calculate existing performance indicators and created new ones once the data relations were properly structured.

The team created hundreds of web services to simplify the data connection to our dashboard and apps. A truly scalable solution!

Finally, we brought it all together with a design-driven, responsive, web-based dashboard that shows the current location of all flights; updated every 250 milliseconds. We added dynamically generated alerts and notifications to visualize complex metrics, tracking and mining data, in a seamless fashion.

03. THE RESULT

The airline controllers can now log in to the dashboard to obtain an overview of their operations. Diverted flights appear in a different color, airports with delays are ranked by severity, delayed flights are accentuated to reflect the impact on connecting routes; and a notification center alerts users on issues with significant operational impact. In addition, real-time statistics are continuously benchmarked against industry metrics to improve the carriers’ performance.