WSI delivers predictive airport analytics to improve safety, passenger throughput

ANDOVER, Mass., 3 Dec. 2015. Passenger air travel is growing globally at a rate of roughly five percent each year – a trend that is expected to continue through the next two decades. Airline officials and airport authorities are investigating and investing in electronics hardware and software tools to optimize the end-to-end workflow, maximize passenger and flight throughput, and reduce flight delays, cancellations, and other challenges.

A growing number of airports are implementing predictive analytics to better manage traffic, keep flights on time, and deal with fast-changing weather – helping ensure travelers’ flights are on-time and travel experiences are positive, especially during the heavy holiday travel season.

Weather Services International (WSI), the professional division of The Weather Company in Andover, Mass., has added a Predictive Airport Analytics element to its Fusion software used by airports around the world. The analytics tool enables dispatchers and air traffic coordinators to more clearly see and understand forecast impacts of weather and traffic flow on airport taxi times, runway configurations, and airport congestion, WSI officials explain.

Using WSI Fusion with Predictive Airport Analytics, airlines gain early insight into changing airport operations and can proactively sharpen fuel contingency, flight, and crew plans to reduce costly network and customer impacts, especially during disruptive weather.

“Airlines lose millions of dollars each year due to excess fuel contingencies and delays at airports resulting from capacity reduction, runway configuration, and taxi time uncertainty,” WSI officials affirm. To help reduce operating costs, WSI has integrated Predictive Airport Analytics into its WSI Fusion platform version 2015.2, and also introduced several key additions in air traffic management and convective weather to help flight dispatchers, operations personnel, and managers stay aware and ahead of changing conditions from planning to touch down.

Additional enhancements in the latest Fusion update include:

Enhanced Convective Package
Convection is a significant cause of both en route and terminal disruption, flight delays as well as safety risk. This new package features high-definition, real-time and forecast convective information, which will enable airlines to pinpoint severe weather and clarify route and terminal decisions. This update also extends coverage for many of the products globally to take the guesswork out of international operations - particularly routing near more vigorous convective activity where there has been limited information until now.

FAA Route Compliance and Significant Change Alerts
The compliance and significant change alerts will help airlines streamline operations by notifying dispatchers when their flights have a route restriction as well as when their flights are in compliance with FAA routes. This will allow the dispatcher and flight crew to ensure that a proper fuel load and routing are loaded for a timely departure.

System Wide Information Management (SWIM) Support
WSI has updated core FAA air traffic management data services to the latest available via System Wide Information Management (SWIM). The latest Fusion update meets FAA compatibility requirements with new FAA data standards for critical ground stop and route constraint information.

WSI Fusion is a flight operation platform that fuses vital weather, airport, airspace, and flight information into actionable insights and alerts, empowering operators to proactively manage and improve safety, efficiency, and performance, officials say.