Business aviation’s adoption of artificial intelligence is gathering pace, and the technology's impact is increasingly profound. Several tech innovators in the sector are now rolling out new ways to ease and improve key tasks, with the common thread being to keep the human in the loop and allow them to focus on what humans do best.
On the basis that time is money, MySky’s focus is on reducing the inordinate amount of time it can take charter operators to respond to requests for quotes. For example, Tyrolean Jets & Services is saving up to 15 minutes in preparing flight proposals for prospective clients by using the AI-based MySky Quote platform.
According to MySky co-founder Chris Marich, its software frees up time for operators to focus on their strategy for maximizing revenues and margins, rather than getting bogged down in manually processing quote requests. That matters since operators commonly receive between 250 and 1,000 requests each day, mainly via email, and many of these are highly speculative, with typically no more than 2% resulting in flight bookings.
“MySky Quote has evolved from being a calculator into a revenue management tool, and the first layer of that [task] is predicting what the [operating] cost will be for a flight with an accuracy of more than 97%,” Marich explained to AIN. “Then they can play with the margin.”
The platform is intended to make it easier for charter operators to build in dynamic pricing that better reflects seasonal fluctuations in supply and demand for what is essentially perishable inventory in the sense that a missed opportunity to operate a revenue flight cannot be recovered.
“It helps operators have a clear vision about the breakeven point for any trip, and they can decide how aggressive they want to be in setting prices,” Marich said. “This isn’t about replacing the human but [rather] empowering the human so they can work on strategy and work with the aircraft owners on how they want to make money.”
Recognizing that the terms under which every aircraft is available in the charter market are different, MySky factors in the contractual relationship between each owner and operator. As the platform builds direct operating costs, it is especially attentive to routing options, taking account of the location of each aircraft and how it might be repositioned to respond to a booking request.
This is based on the Smart Trip Builder feature of the platform, which takes into account future trip bookings, costs, and crew duty time limits. MySky can be integrated with flight scheduling software to ensure that all variables are considered, and the company also offers its MySky Procure platform to control costs between the booking being confirmed and the flight taking off.
In a bid to help operators achieve precision in predicting costs for items like fuel that fluctuate, MySky is now building on its partnership with Essential Jet Solution to introduce guaranteed jet-A prices at 50 locations. “To be able to de-risk [trip pricing], operators have to be able to understand the cost differentials, and that is hard,” said Marich. “In theory, we could cover costs like ground handling, but we’re trying this approach for fuel because it is a big component of the price.”
According to Julia Gstrein, head of charter sales at Tyrolean Jets, MySky Quote has made it much faster for her team to deal with 200 requests each day. “MySky Quote updates all the parameters automatically, so nothing gets lost in a quote,” she said. “And whenever I have a question, the customer support team is always happy to help. I also appreciate how easily I can recalculate a quote for a different aircraft in our fleet.”
Better Editing of Documents
Web Manuals is now launching a component for its Amelia family of AI-backed document management systems with the launch of Amelia Co-Author. This is an extension of its existing editing tool and is mainly intended to help companies’ subject matter experts who are in charge of writing and compiling regulatory and safety manuals.
“It helps to ensure consistency, and by adding some AI functionality to the existing editing tool, it simplifies the way information is reformatted: for example, changing a list of bullet points into a table. It can also suggest rewrites to simplify the English and can ingest scanned papers,” Web Manuals CEO and co-founder Martin Lidgard explained.
Web Manuals remains alert to the risks of AI malfunctioning in unintended ways. Its technical team has introduced constraints to stop access to unauthorized information or efforts to circumvent the correct process. The use of firewalls stops users from “tricking” the AI tool into allowing access to information that is not acceptable for the purposes of managing company manuals.
The text prepared using Amelia is not immediately released to pilots and other staff. There are several internal approval steps, and regulators also review any proposed changes to manuals.
“With the Amelia Reader, we saw that there was a need not only to access content but also to provide guidance in what was most important, and so we have been fine-tuning our AI model in terms of how it classifies content,” Lidgard explained. “Some operators have to deal with over 10,000 pages of manuals, and it's easy to forget where everything is, especially since there are changes all the time.”
Web Manuals is now investing in a new large language model for its manual authoring tool. Search results that have taken around 25 seconds should now only take a couple of seconds.
According to Lidgard, part of the motivation for streamlining aviation’s huge document management task is to address the knowledge gap that has widened with the retirement of long-serving industry professionals and their replacement by younger, less experienced colleagues. “At the same time [as the generational shift in the workforce], there has been a higher pace of new regulations and technology, and we are contributing to making these new people smarter, better, and faster at their jobs,” he said.
Meanwhile, to support operators’ efforts to protect their data, Web Manuals is now sharing its own best practices on data security to provide a template manual. This is covered by its subscription and is compliant with EASA’s new Part IS regulations. The company recently achieved the System and Organizational Controls 2 standard for the IT industry, verifying its commitment to the security, availability, and confidentiality of customer data.
Last year, the company’s client base grew by 18%, and its systems now support operators managing more than 700 aircraft. It recently opened a new office in Sydney and is set to open another in Barcelona. It already has bases in Sweden, Singapore, and on both the U.S. East and West Coasts.
Getting Answers from AI Chatbots
In a further bid to simplify the user interface for its operations management platform, FL3XX is preparing to introduce an AI-based conversational element to the system. This means customers can ask the app to retrieve information needed for a task, such as the name and contact details of a pilot, or the location of an aircraft.
“If it [the AI Chatbot] finds the information, it will provide a link to it, but if it doesn’t, it will turn the situation around by searching the database for people or things that sound like it,” explained Paolo Sommariva, the Austria-based company’s co-founder and CEO. “It will then point you to [where you need to be] in a smart way. And you can ask smart questions, such as whether a caterer you’ve asked about has confirmed the delivery. And you can do all these things while doing other things.”
FL3XX is building in security protections to ensure that specific users only get access to information they are supposed to be able to see. So, for example, flight dispatchers and those involved in charter sales will have different levels of access, and a dispatcher would not need to know specific passenger names.
“There needs to be a huge amount of data for AI to understand what we are expressing [in voice commands and questions], but the data is all strictly private because each customer will have their own database,” said Sommariva, who pointed out that the technology can work in any language.
According to FL3XX, operators using its platform have achieved an improvement of more than 80% in the efficiency of internal communications. For tasks like crew scheduling, it is proving to be around 30% faster and 25% quicker for fleet availability tasks.
The company is continuing to expand the scope of how AI could be applied to increasingly automate functions such as reordering supplies. This progress will likely come more quickly than with tasks that are critical from a safety or commercial point of view, such as securing flight permits.
“The industry has a very exciting two or three years ahead of us that will change the way it works and will improve the efficiency to get better at serving customers in real time,” Sommariva concluded. “Some resistance to change is innate in human beings, but I do expect to see AI adopted by the business aviation workforce, even if it takes some more time.”