The COVID-19 crisis wreaked havoc on global and national supply chains, financial markets, livelihoods, and the economy. If the shock of 2020 has taught us anything, it’s that our complex and globalized world needs drastically higher levels of redundancy and resiliency embedded into our institutions, professions, and personal lives alike.
The need for resilience doesn’t stop with COVID; for as much as our interconnected world was tested- and continues to be tested- by the deadly pandemic, a much larger crisis awaits us. Climate change, according to Harvard Business School’s Rebecca Henderson through her book “Reimagining Capitalism”, requires industry leaders to embrace a new vision of business. And as we’ve seen with COVID-19, no sector is more integrated in our lives whilst simultaneously prone to collapse from complex crises, than that of aviation and airlines.
It’s hard to imagine on a cold January morning, but thinking back to sweltering summers when daytime temperatures are too hot, we realize our tendency is to push some of our outdoor activities off until the evening, when more comfortable conditions provide some respite from the heat and humidity. This natural human behavior will soon have to be replicated in aviation; airlines may have to start moving towards weather-centric operations in the coming years as a continued increase in global temperatures could be the catalyst for a new category of complications related to air transportation scheduling, operations and efficiency.
In recent years, there has been a rise in flight cancellations due to extreme air temperatures: multiple flights 2017 in Phoenix, Arizona were grounded as the runway tarmac melted due to extreme heat, whilst in 2019 thousands of flights were canceled in and out of Chicago due to extreme cold. Worryingly, this trend is likely to continue.
The solution to climate-related disruption is more complex than re-imagining airport de-icing operations. With extreme temperatures increases, the density of air becomes lower and decreases the lift capacity on aircraft wings. Further, potential disruptions do not end when the wheels are up. Research has pointed towards an expected increase in in-flight turbulence to accompany higher global average temperatures, impacting both atmospheric moisture patterns and concentrations, as well as the overall behavior of jet streams. Finally, even with an average temperature increase, changing climate patterns may also result in colder atmospheric temperatures affecting certain flight paths, so microphysics-related aircraft icing issues may require additional operational and risk identification measures to be implemented into commercial flight plans.
The daily disruption and uncertainty to travel that was brought forward by COVID-19 may be here to stay. Airline operations are heavily network-driven, global operations. Even a small delay or flight cancelation in, say, Atlanta can cause major disruptions in New York, Toronto, or even Shanghai. Readers are aware of the human and financial impacts of longer delays, missed connections, and cancelations. Those travelers requiring efficiency to move between conferences and meetings before making it home for Thursday evening dinner with the family may have to rethink something that has long been taken for granted: that personal and professional efficiency around transporting ourselves and our goods may soon be in the rear-view mirror.
These are only a few of the many potential implications to the air transportation industry that may result from a changing climate in the years ahead. The economic and commercial infrastructure underlying the global airline industry has been strategically, mathematically and operationally optimized to account for expected climate conditions to continue. It may be time to rethink these assumptions that underpin our ease of movement.
The large scale infrastructure changes required to accompany future climate conditions include a multi-decadal engineering overhaul, which will impact nearly all human and economic activity. But under the assumptions of a continuing changing climate, and as per Henderson’s call to action from the private sector, how can the aviation sector lead the way for managing these outsized risks: how can they better plan and optimize to avoid incurring additional costs, while still maximizing aviation safety?
Unfortunately, the answer does not lie in the technology of the aircraft themselves, which- as advanced as they are- are confined by business dynamics and a commercially viable lifespan of several decades. Climate-specific aircraft technologies created today typically will not become an aircraft feature for twenty years.
For the aviation sector, the solution could well lie in the problem itself: weather. A fresh and innovative look at weather and climate data can provide a new lens through which to view potential solutions. In a real-time operational environment, analysts responsible for the scheduling and routing of aircraft are largely at the mercy of short to medium range weather forecasts, where much-needed forecasting drops off after approximately two weeks in a best-case scenario. For carriers wishing to forecast the likelihood of disruption so that they may choose to plan for, or hedge against, potential margin or revenue loss (and transport us to conferences and back on time), new approaches with new data will be needed. A wholistic, systems approach with alternative data sources is urgently needed to mitigate some of the financial and physical consequences.
Global physical climate time-series data is available from a variety of private, public, and government sources. The data relevant to this discussion are representative of various atmospheric, oceanic, and physical drivers within the global climate system, and many contain data with a period of record of at least 50 years- or much longer in many cases. These include data that represent a wide spectrum of global, regional, subregional, and localized physical processes, across space- and time- scales. As the physics-based laws which govern weather dynamics are amenable to research applications that focus on anomaly detection, so too we can analyze this empirical data for novel insights related to the behavior of the atmosphere, to facilitate a much-needed data layer addressing aviation risk.
Therefore, we can start to think about new ways to apply machine learning techniques towards time series and teleconnection analyses, with the goal of identifying risk precursors to weather and climate patterns considered favorable or unfavorable to commercial aviation. Longer term evolution of the transportation infrastructure system notwithstanding, the interim variability and risk can at least partially be managed through novel and creative uses of available data.
Further, it is possible to assemble a comprehensive database which will ingest these data sources, and with new tools and techniques, search for patterns that are repeatable and quantifiable. Next would come the construction of a set of rules that define favorable and unfavorable flight path regimes, which can be clustered to geographies at risk- such as Phoenix and Chicago. These rules will be able to identify, with various lead times, key operating characteristics related to favorable conditions regarding planning seasonal routes, for example, and as a consequence further point towards appropriate scheduling strategies.
Using such a data aggregation approach, airlines can also start to devise novel hedging strategies for the factors that have largest impacts on its profitability: spot and long- term fuel procurement, seasonal maintenance and operational requirements, changes in passenger demand, and alternate flight path strategies.
The aggregation of weather data presents only one of many creative ways in which the aviation sector, particularly airlines, can begin to ready itself for continued and increasing disruption in the face of growing climate-related threats. As COVID-19 brings to the fore the inherent risk in our over-reliance on system-wide efficiency, we must start to prepare for redundancies and implement resilience into our global supply chains, of which aviation is a major sector.
Airlines should now listen more closely to Rebecca Henderson’s bold call to action and must fully engage with climate threats if we are to avoid further wide-scale uncertainty and disruption. Moving beyond legacy systems and building nimble, data-driven technologies that incorporate weather and climate analysis can only leave the private sector in a position to better weather the storms that are sure to disrupt the industry in the years and decades ahead.
