Why Legacy Messaging Distorts Airline Costs

From a cost standpoint, airlines today are squeezed three ways.

1. They have flight-related costs tied to volatile fuel prices, crews and aircraft maintenance.
2. They have passenger-related costs that vary with the number of passengers—a number that today can drop precipitously through the spread of contagious diseases and the after effects of natural disasters like volcanoes, earthquakes and tsunamis.
3. And there are also the fixed implementation costs associated with any business.

Airlines have a desperate need to control costs in every sector of their business. More efficient technology is one way such airlines can realize significant savings in the vital area of communications. This area spans all data transfer requirements from Baggage Sortation Messages (BSM) to flight plan filing and CDM requests to passenger/crew manifests (APIS) submitted to government eBorders systems.

AIRS was created by AvFinity to control messaging and the infrastructure to support messaging.

That’s why roughly 50% of the North American regional air carrier market has chosen the AIRS innovation in just the last year alone.

Solving the Babel of Aviation Communications Issues

In an effort to gain a cost or efficiency advantage—even for the short-term—different airlines and government agencies continue to adopt different IT solutions. This approach has led to a babel of communication protocols, diverse message formats and disparate network systems. To access this scene of confusion, airlines must rely on a combination of legacy and more modern IT architectures as well as legacy Type B and more modern (TCP/IP) messaging suppliers.

The result is daily challenges to an airline’s IT department in handling communications with needed flight partners under this mongrelized communications industry structure.

Left without a universal solution, conditions won’t improve for aviation. In response to an increasingly tough competitive and economic environment, airlines are merging and consolidating. And many others are forming strategic alliances. Suddenly established airlines must immediately communicate with new partners.

This evolution—operating within an aviation industry backdrop of IT cost-cutting and a desire to outsource—further muddies the communications picture.

Consider an AIRS solution configured in a hub (or star). AvFinity’s OPEN Communication Hub is a quick, convenient and cost-effective way for airlines to link their applications to meet code share and alliance obligations. The OPEN Communication Hub handles the routing, management, protocol and formatting issues on behalf of the airlines. All the solutions needed in a single but powerful appliance.