Big Data Helps GE Drive Airline Efficiency

GE Aviation’s Flight Efficiency Services division is using big data techniques to help airlines to improve their profit margins with a particular focus on reducing fuel burn. “Fuel accounts for 40 percent of airline costs with around $215 billion spent on this each year,” said general manager Giovanni Spitale. “GE thinks that if machines can talk to each other using the industrial internet [a term coined by GE] we can make better sense of that [fuel consumption].”

Essentially, GE’s view is that while operators know perfectly well what they need to be doing to save fuel, but they sometimes struggle to do these things systematically. By combining its knowledge of Sixth Sigma best practice management with data science, the company is demonstrating to operators exactly how the most worthwhile savings can be achieved.

“For example, take single-engine taxiing. Everyone knows you should do that but what is hard is quantifying the amount of fuel that can be saved that way,” said Spitale. “Another example is the cost associated with carrying fuel in tanks that doesn’t need to be there. Our philosophy is that rather than having separate analytics tools we have a macro information set that can spot deviations in fuel burn on a day-to-day basis, or even looking at different times of the day.”

AirAsia has been using Flight Efficiency Services to handle flight data analytics and fuel management for its fleet of Airbus A320 and A330 aircraft. The techniques are saving AirAsia more than one percent of its annual fuel bill, equating to about 550 pounds of fuel on a one-hour flight. GE’s data dashboard integrates flight data with operational, weather, trajectory correction, navigation and terrain data, allowing airlines to tactically manage their daily operations.

Here at the Farnborough Airshow the company announced yesterday that it had signed a contract with SpiceJet Airlines of India for the support of its fleet of 52 aircraft–Boeing 737s and Bombardier Q400s. With India having some of the highest fuel pricing in the world, the contract will help the airline to realized “substantial savings,” said Alan Caslavka, GE’s president of avionics and digital systems.

GE (Chalet P1-5) is also involved in a joint venture business with Accenture called Taleris that has developed software and processes to help airlines deal with disruptions to their operations. For instance, Taleris might help resolve a situation where aircraft, crew and passengers have to be re-routed. Abu Dhabi’s Etihad Airways is the launch customer for this service.