By the mid-2030s, there will be approximately 40,000 commercial aircraft operating worldwide, a 42% increase in the number of active commercial aircraft, doubling the average number of scheduled flights per day to 200,000.
With this much traffic, potential congestion and narrowing airspace corridors, risk levels will inevitably and significantly increase; it will be more important than ever to truly understand the operating environment and the risks faced by every single flight.
Making air travel safer for passengers, crew, and the aircraft itself is the primary objective of risk management. However, risk management is frequently either too vague, too subjective, or simply not good enough to be beneficial from an operational standpoint. It is widely thought of as a costly and time-consuming endeavour. Fortunately, new technology and the amount of data available in the public domain have changed this. Having access to the right data and technology can save airlines millions of dollars while improving their security level.
Disruption is already one of the most significant cost centres for operators, costing millions of dollars in delays, cancellations, and diversions every year.
Although many see weather as one of the more obvious causes of flight disruption, other factors, such as unruly passengers, civil unrest, cyber-attacks, drones, and conflict zone activity, all have a significant impact. With forewarning and planning, these can be frequently avoided.
“It would be unconscionable for an aircraft to take off without a thorough understanding of all meteorological conditions along the route, and yet they travel all the time without a deep understanding of the broader risks they might face.”
– Andrew Nicholson, CEO, Osprey Flight Solutions
Andrew Nicholson, CEO of Osprey Flight Solutions, says "it would be unconscionable for an aircraft to take off without a thorough understanding of all meteorological conditions along the route, and yet they travel all the time without a deep understanding, often without any understanding at all, of the broader risks they might face". Operational changes such as choosing longer routes due to the perceived risks of flying the most direct path can cause significant increases in fuel and time costs.
So, with more and more aircraft in the sky, and a greater chance of disruptions affecting aviation operations. Why isn't more being done to help predict and prevent this?
The costs of avoidable disruption
Many of the costs associated with disruptive events have traditionally been seen as just “the cost of doing business”, but new technologies on the market are slowly changing this perception and helping to limit some of these costs. In this economic environment, any area where costs can be saved is critical; even small percentage gains can make major financial differences.
However, the question remains: "How does an operator reach the point at which they can confidently act on a disruptive event to help prevent loss?“
Well, this requires a multitude of factors working simultaneously: faster access to accurate and relevant information; the ability to access "in the moment" situational intelligence; country, airport, and airspace data that reflects the current environment; the ability to understand how this affects operations; streamlined ways to share the intel with relevant stakeholders; and efficient decisionmaking.
Without trust in the data and assessments, airlines may not be able to make informed decisions, which can have serious consequences. Therefore, building trust in the information and intelligence systems is crucial for successful operations.
“Keeping busy heterogenous skies safe will require fast development of efficient specific risk management training, incorporating robust and accurate data is vital to address the new risks associated proactively.”
– Vincent Incammicia, CEO, International Flight Operations Academy (IFOA)
Limitations of existing risk management
Traditional sources of risk information have, until recently, never been designed to consider rapidly changing environments or provide situational intelligence; the very techniques used are the opposite of dynamic. Often relying on sanitised classified information, manual Google searches, or government advisories and notices.
Operators often don’t have access to the information they need to act quickly when, or preferably before, events occur, resulting in cancellations, diversions, and, in extreme cases, the loss of aircraft. As seen last year with the Ukrainian invasion, there was poor planning and a lack of accurate information about ‘when’ the invasion was going to happen. Many services offering intelligence to the aviation industry wrongly stated that an invasion was unlikely in the days before it happened!
Osprey’s Chief Intelligence Officer, Matthew Borie, comments “Conflict Zone reporting is as much about cutting through the political and diplomatic influences and removing bias, looking at actual risk separate from conflict zone regulatory notices. In the year since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Osprey has generated a solution that provides dynamic, timely and accurate data-led security risk assessments for flights near the Russia-Ukraine conflict zone. ”
We can also see that significant incidents around the globe happen frequently, with smaller incidents happening every day.
A new way – leveraging OSINT to manage risk
This is why the next generation of security risk intelligence is taking a different approach…
Leveraging a combination of open-source intelligence, the gold standard in intelligence circles for fast and reliable information on emerging events, with technology that can “filter out the noise” and categorise events to assist with the identification of patterns and anomalies indicating a disruptive event, technology can start to ‘predict’ and forecast events that impact the industry.
