If an automated system fails, workers face unprecedented additional labor, stress and time in handling things manually.
One such automated system failure across UK airports on bank holiday Monday this week, not only left thousands of passengers stranded, but also made the aviation workers of at least five airports face a harrowing time, by forcing them to handle flight plans manually.
The flight planning issue impacted the system’s ability to automatically process flight plans, meaning they had to be processed manually, causing massive traffic flow restrictions.
This resulted in more than 27% of all flights (790 departures and 785 arrivals) to and from UK airports being cancelled and hundreds delayed by up to 12 hours.
London’s busiest airport, Heathrow, faced the greatest disruption, followed closely by Gatwick and Manchester. Luton, Newcastle International and London Stansted were amongst the other airports also impacted.
“It will take some time for flights to return to normal, and we will continue to work with the airlines and the airports to recover the situation,” National Air Traffic Services Operations Director Juliet Kennedy said in a statement.
Even though the cause of the issue is currently being investigated, the UK’s transport secretary, Mark Harper, confirmed that the government was “clear it wasn’t a cyberattack.”
Self-healing infrastructure
As airlines continue to adopt digital technologies to improve operations, such as optimizing the performance of aircraft departures and arrivals, there are instances like this latest technical glitch, where things can go wrong.
To circumvent these issues and minimize disruption, HCLTech has developed a concept for an intelligent and predictive self-healing infrastructure, which includes elastic demand management capabilities to eliminate the downtime of all applications supporting airline operations and customer service activities.
- Operations and customer service process and performance management
- Applications process continuity
- Predictive and self-healing infrastructure models that eliminate system downtime
- Management information and control dashboards for real-time and predictive outcomes
HCLTech’s flying colors
Beyond minimizing downtime, the industry is looking to drive innovation to reach its next-generation enterprise goals. To help with this, HCLTech has been leveraging several tech tenets to help aerospace and defense (A&D) companies generate exponential change to enterprise business systems.
From cybersecurity to cognitive automation and a long-standing relationship with the A&D, HCLTech's services and solutions have been helping transform leading airlines and airports, globally.
HCLTech technology agnostic process automation empowered with AI-ML layer helps airlines, airports, travel management, hotels, OTAs and cruises companies to minimize overall operation costs by automating complex workflow to reduce time and error.
Through human-centered design-led platform solutions, HCLTech is eliminating waste through autonomics (AI + analytics), driving rapid change with DevOps, innovating through the ecosystem, controlling rising costs and generating new business models through Internet of Things (IoT).
For example, after the acquisition of AXON, HCLTech and SAP partnered with Malaysia Airlines in 2010 to integrate its finance procurement and human resource functions as well as engineering and maintenance operations at the KL International Airport and Subang Airport.
After that, HCLTech went on to partner with leading global aircraft manufacturers to digitally transform the organizations and drive sustainability efforts. The success stories are great examples of sustainable measures in action, which include implementation of a BPM framework to the enhancement of an ERP platform to reduce operational costs and facilitate seamless transition to cloud.
In 2019, HCLTech also signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Maharashtra Airport Development Company (MADC) for the expansion of its MIHAN campus in Nagpur, India.
