David Stewart
First there is the shock, now the industry has to prepare and facilitate for the recovery.
Narrator
Welcome to the special edition of the Velocity podcast. Aviation industry experts were not able to convene in person at the Farnborough International Airshow this year. The Farnborough team brought the event to the virtual platform with the FIA Connect series of digital events. Oliver Wyman’s David Stewart was invited to participate in the aviation relaunch and recovery session, joined by Mike Delaney from Boeing and LeAnn Ridgeway from Collins Aerospace. Thank you, and we hope you enjoy the show.
David
Welcome to this session on commercial aviation restart and recovery. My name is David Stewart and I’m the partner in the aviation and aerospace team at Oliver Wyman management consulting.
I’m here today as the moderator for a panel of select speakers with highly relevant knowledge to inform you on the topics at hand. I’ll introduce the panelists shortly. But first, I just wanted to reflect on why we’re here and the importance of this topic.
The impacts of COVID-19 since February on our aviation ecosystem has been unprecedented and dramatic. By May and June, airlines globally had cutback capacity by 75 to 80%. A huge proportion. I worked through at least three aviation downturns, and none have been more deep or more broad. Obviously, first there is the shock. Now, the industry has to prepare to facilitate the recovery. As ever, it’s the airlines that pay the bills and the airlines need passengers to be happy to travel.
We have to understand what drives traveler sentiment and consumer confidence. This is a huge topic, worthy of many hours, just by itself. But let me give you just three factoids from a recent Oliver Wyman survey into traveler sentiment. First, when asked what would be the key determinant for it to be okay to start your first air trip, the biggest factor was government policy and the lifting of travel and quarantine instructions. Second, the perceived hygiene and cleanliness on an airline become one of the top three selection factors when choosing with whom to travel but interestingly, the perceived airport hygiene is just as, if not more, important.
And last but not least, mixed in all that kind of doom and gloom of the industry news at the moment, what I think was quite a positive outcome from the survey was, when asked whether they had traveled the same, more, or less, 75% of business travelers said that they would travel the same on more than they did pre-COVID.
I want to introduce the panelists now. First, we have Mike Delaney. He’s currently leading Boeing’s confident travel program with the aim of leveraging Boeing’s vast resources to help the aviation industry safely resume global air travel amid the pandemic. Previously to this role, he led engineering in Boeing’s aircraft development activities. Second, we have LeAnn Ridgeway. She’s leading Collins Aerospace’s cross business taskforce, called redefining air travel. Her day job before COVID struck, and probably still is, head of Collins Information Management Services Group. The key question here is how do we best get people flying again? What’s needed to shore up consumer confidence in aviation on a sustainable basis?
So, Mike, I’ll start with you, if I may. Let us know what Boeing is doing and what the levers are to restore the confidence as you see it.
Mike Delaney
Thank you, David, and thanks for hosting this panel.
Yes, I’d like to talk to about how we’re thinking about it, and you alluded to my background in engineering, in Boeing, and most of you on this panel are aerospace people, we’re not medical professionals.
We sat down and said, okay, as a chief engineer in aerospace, we think about threats to airplanes, and that’s how we design and architect the safest system in the world. Those threats could be external like lightning strike or wind shear. They could be internal washer function, malfunction, secession of function, and so, just like that we approach the safety of the airplane.
So, let’s think about that COVID as a risk or threat to the passengers and to the airplane. And so we said, okay, what would we normally do to think about that to ensure that we could restore confidence by building on aerospace principles and practices. And first what we want to do is ensure a healthy travel journey and experience for both the passengers and the crew.
Passengers to take advantage of going where they want to go for business or leisure. The crew and the baggage handlers, that’s their workplace environment. It’s a workplace safety issue for those folks just like in the airplane design where you would use multiple layers of protection redundancy or independent layer, let’s think about this approach that way.
We laid out three layers of protection. First thing, we had to protect the whole journey because disease transmission can happen not just on the airplane but anywhere in the journey. The travel to the airport, check-in, security baggage claim, at the gate, anywhere. We said, lets model that whole journey to understand where the risk points are. And we then reached out to airports and airlines, suppliers, government agencies, how do we think about the risk in the travel journey?
The second piece is then saying, okay, the airplane, when you’re in the airplane, which traditional ground based or traditional methods of social distancing are more difficult, first and foremost, we want to present the airplane in a clean environment. And so we’ve developed a clean airplane program which is similar again, to the maintenance program for the airplane or engine. So, think about the activity that you have to do the frequency and the efficacy of it. We’ve developed with our partners and with our airlines in the industry a cleaning program.
And the third piece is then to sit down and say, we have to assume that they are going to be indexing passengers on the airplane who has COVID-19, because so many are asymptomatic so how do we use the capabilities of the airplane to minimize the transmission in the flight phase of the airplane, and that requires detailed modeling of the environmental control system or the air conditioning system on the airplane, the geometry, the seat backs, whether it’s a single-aisle airplane or a twin aisle airplane, how people board the airplane, how you run the air conditioning system… The good news is that the airplane for design purposes of air quality and velocity gradients actually has an extremely capable system on it that really is very good at minimizing transmission of COVID-19.
So, we’re thinking about this as a multi-layer approach and then we’re thinking about it over three time horizons. I call it days, which is zero to 90 days where we responded the airlines. Can I use to cleaner? How many times can I apply it? Will it impact the flammability of my airplane? Will it kill the disease? The second phase will be months, which is us positioning a set of capabilities with the airlines. So as air travel capacity and load factors come back, the airlines can handle this increased demand on them, and their travel system can. And the third phase will be a year, two years or couple years, which will be how do we harden the system and ensure that not only this pandemic but any future pandemics or issues like this, the air travel system has learned lessons from. And that’s how we are approaching it. We’re approaching it as an industry effort. We’re being very transparent and open. We’ve taken a position, we’re going to share all of our information and data and modeling results we’re working with governments and agencies, airlines, and supply chains because I think our best interest is to have people believe, understand how safe it is to be on an airplane. And we intend to prove it with modeling that traveling on an airplane is as safe or safer than any other activity that people would do and it’s a risk decision, an average risk decision versus a specific risk decision that people are going to make. So that’s how we’re approaching it, David.
David
Thanks Mike, that’s really interesting to hear. I will move on to LeAnn, now, if I may and just get an aspect because I know you’ve been working on the airport angle of this and some of the ground side part of the customer journey. And airports are also key in the passenger journey, and they’ll be part of the answer in an adoption of the screening, and health verification. So, what’s going on from your perspective, in the world of airport technology and design?
LeAnn Ridgeway
Well, good day. Thanks, David, I appreciate the opportunity to speak on the panel and just like Mike’s been doing with Boeing, we’ve been actively busy working across the industry as well.
We have a shared approach and I think vision. It’s refreshing to see everybody coming together at this time of need in our industry and it is going to take all of us working together, industrial, OEMs, airlines, airports, government agencies, all of the vast associations that have been coming together.
And then the good news is we’ve all got the same goal working with academia, we’re working with medical professionals. All trying to restore this confidence for the flying public as we’ve approached the problem, we’ve dissected it. I think we’re all looking at it as a system and so, to your point, we’ve got to have the journey from curb to curb. It’s got to be as pristine we can have it.
So, as we look and we just heard all the vast things that Boeing is doing and Michael’s doing on the task force. We’re doing similar things on board the aircraft with interiors. But we’ve got a large focus right now in the airports because as we said, travelers want consistency, they want to know what to expect and they really want to make sure, per your opening comments, that whether they’re traveling to the airport on the aircraft, they can be assured everything that’s possible that can be done is being done.
And so, I’ll tell you, we’ve been pretty excited about what we’ve been able to do in a relatively short term for the airport. We know that airports themselves are doing a great deal with cleanliness with changing some procedures with also PPE and stuff like that. But maybe I’ll focus a little bit here in my answer on some of the technologies that are going to further reduce virus transmissions at the airport. And I think, first and foremost, biometrics is going to be the key enabler that’s going to, not only facilitate that for passengers, but also for the staff, crew, and vendors as well. And biometrics, I believe, will provide an easy contactless journey through the airport by utilizing facial recognition, and using that single token, biometric journey, that gets the passenger certainly from curb to gate.
The good news about that is that technology is available today and it had a business case, previous to COVID-19, in regard to saving space for the airports, to improving the passenger experience, to facilitating, actually the efficiency of moving through the airport boarding an aircraft. So now you add the added benefit of reducing contact with humans and by documents than face to face by using the biometrics journey. And you’ve really got an easy solution that will facilitate the reduction of the virus transmission. And so, I think that’s the number one key technology.
In recent weeks we’ve seen support for that recommendation come out from various associations like AKO, and IATA and ACI as well. And so, we expect to see more continuation of that. So, I think that’s going to be the number one building block that we can do in the near-term with technology that’s already here.
I think other technology that we’ve invested in and we’re starting to see show up is mobile phone solutions, where we can eliminate the contact touchpoints of things like the kiosk and you can use your own smart device, mobile device, to manage and manipulate. That’s also true for things like now utilizing that technology for where cash and money and credit cards are transmitted. You can also use your mobile and your biometric technologies for that. We also believe that there will be a great need for using technology to reduce congestion points through the airport to kind of help with the way finding. You can use a lot of a smartphone technology there to where you could be sending signals and cues that this TSA line or security line is saying a red condition with congestion, maybe you want to go check in down here at a yellow or green congestion point.
So, we see that type of wayfinding and congestion technology coming into play here. Certainly, we would see things like offsite check-in and baggage processing and dropping that happens today at certain places to kind of eliminate and reduce some of that congestion.
Another thing that’s in the news would be the health screening, certainly having anything, from a single temperature check to maybe a multiple biomarker check, were it could be checking a layered approach, the respirations and heart rates and things like that to get a more accurate reading. We also believe that there’s going to be ability to bring in artificial intelligence to help airport operations to where you can do more finite manipulation of your gate, border, boarding, and the management of the systems throughout the airport. I think two other things that we’ve been exploring since that are also applicable, when you get inside the airport, would be different sterilization methods.
Different potential for UV lighting is showing very promising potential. However, we still have a lot of scientific experiments to do to make sure that it’s safe for humans and the right level. And then also that it isn’t degrading the materials on the aircraft. It looks promising, but we’ll continue to explore that. And I think probably finally we’ll see potentially in the future new antiviral coatings and materials that could be used in the aircraft, the gate areas, and stuff like that, that could reduce the transmission of the viruses on surfaces. A lot of innovation, a lot of technology that is in various stages, utilizing Mike’s three-phased approach to near-term versus a little bit longer term, that I think is going to help, not only with this situation, but any future viral transmission.
David
Thank you, LeAnn. That’s a comprehensive list. Clearly a lot of innovation going on. There’s a lot of opportunities to minimize that transmission risk. So that’s fascinating. Thank you very much for that. It’s very clear, there’s a huge amount of activity going on. You’re all extremely busy, no surprise there. We’re now at the end of the runway in terms of the session.
So firstly, on behalf of myself, because frankly I found this very informative and helpful so thank you on behalf of myself and then from all the listeners for this program. Thank you very much for your time and your insights and your thoughtfulness.
My takeaway is the industry is energized itself to respond to what is probably the most dramatic crisis it’s kind of faced in a long time. But if we get that cooperation right, the communications right, the integration of activity, right. I'm very confident, having seen it before, the industry will come back just as good as it was before. So, once again, thank you to all of you for your time and thoughtfulness and I look forward to speaking to you, live face-to-face at the Paris Air Show next year.
Thank you for joining us for this special edition of the Velocity podcast. We invite you to subscribe so you’ll be notified when the next episode goes live. The full session recording is available on the website, a link can be found in the episode description.
This transcript has been edited for clarity.
