In business aviation the mission is getting executives and VIPs precisely where they need to be when they need to be there. To complete that mission takes nearly a prescient dispatch department and flight crew working as a team. Weather and traffic forecasts are powerful, but knowing what is going on just ahead of you as you fly along is even better (thus why our airplanes carry onboard weather radar).
WSI (Booth #C10840), a wholly-owned subsidiary of The Weather Company, has been in the business of collecting weather data and making sense of it for commercial aviation operators for nearly 30 years. The company is at NBAA 2015 with its recently enhanced WSI Fusion software, created specifically for the needs of corporate and charter flight departments. The software complements the company’s PilotBrief program and flight-tracking information by providing dispatchers, managers and other ground operations staff with their own powerful tool for keeping the department running on time.
The program employs a fusion of public- and WSI-derived weather information and considers airspace and airport constraints, flight-tracking information and navigation data, creating simplified graphical information and alerts that help dispatchers make decisions on routing for individual flights. The program is getting more powerful, too. Just last month Fusion was enhanced with predictive analytics that allow the program to forecast airport congestion, even taxi times, based on wind changes, inbound-outbound traffic analyses and, of course, weather.
“WSI Fusion is really a platform for managing individual flights in real-time,” Mark Miller, v-p and general manager of decision support for WSI, told AIN. “It helps provide both the dispatcher, and through its functions, the flight crew, early insight to any form of disruption that may affect a flight. With Fusion, when a dispatcher receives an alert of possible problems, say turbulence ahead, she can simply right click on her mouse and send that information via satcom or even ACARS to the specific flight crew, giving them time to consider a reroute or altitude change.”
WSI’s extensive network of both human and digital traffic monitoring, weather collection and forecasting systems is key to how WSI Fusion works. “We’ve got continuous monitoring of airspace and weather worldwide,” said Miller. WSI gets its turbulence information from proprietary sensors it installs onboard participating aircraft worldwide as part of its Total Turbulence program. It doesn’t get any more real-time than that.
“We support both U.S. and EuroControl flight data [tracking] and a global ADS-B network, as well. We augment this with operator position reports in any areas where we don’t yet have tracking capability,” he explained. All of the information required to compile an accurate track and real-time information about flight conditions happens behind the scenes. The dispatcher just sees what she needs to see: the aircraft track and any advance warnings of potential trouble for the flight.
“With advance notice of possible disruptions, Fusion empowers the flight department, from dispatcher to flight crew, to meet its mission safely and efficiently,” said Miller.
