The ground radars installed at major airports usually serve the purpose of monitoring live ground traffic of aircraft and airside vehicles for safety purposes. Radar data is then usually stored with a possibility to "replay" past activity in a similar manner as rewinding a video player.
By breaking down ground radar data into searchable aircraft trajectories, Safety Line’s AirsideWatch unleashes powerful airport operations and safety analytics, allowing all types of searches on a variety of criteria such as multiple points of passage, airline, aircraft type, date and time, type of trajectory and trajectory phase, and visibility and lighting conditions.
Furthermore, trajectories are broken down into specific phases, from parking and pushback to alignment and take-off, or from landing and runway exit to gate, with the possibility to identify the time and distance covered between any two phases. This allows for additional analytics such as taxi time and distance, time at gate, or time at de-icing bays.
Finally, AirsideWatch will also help airports monitor much more precisely than ever their noise and emissions impact by feeding noise and emissions simulation models with extremely precise inputs from actual aircraft trajectories, including speeds and accelerations.
After several years of joint research between Safety Line and Groupe ADP in tight partnership with its Innovation Hub, Paris-Orly Airport becomes the first customer for AirsideWatch, with Paris-Charles de Gaulle Airport to follow in its footsteps shortly.
"AirsideWatch provides us with unprecedented visibility on everything that happens at any location on our aprons, taxiways and runways, at any given time." Says Edward Arkwright, deputy CEO of Groupe ADP. "This makes for powerful analytics that will allow parisian airports to further improve their efficiency and safety while limiting their environmental impact"
SkyBlocks - Safety Line’s aviation data platform
Safety Line provides Big Data solutions for the efficiency & safety of airline and airport operations. In order to store and process the vast amounts of data generated from ground radars, Safety Line developed an aviation data platform which it is introducing today as ‘SkyBlocks’ in reference to the various building blocks that compose it.
SkyBlocks is fed by different sources of data. Ground radar data and weather inputs are the basis for AirsideWatch. Flight data and weather forecasts are the inputs for OptiClimb, the only climb optimisation solution allowing airlines to save 5 to 10 percent of climb fuel, and FlightScanner, a unique Big Data safety analysis solution allowing to identify correlations between safety incidents such as long landings or hard landings and the non-obvious flight parameters associated with them.
So far, SkyBlocks has accumulated radar data from 800,000 aircraft movements at 4 airports including Paris-Orly and Paris-Charles de Gaulle and flight data from 600,000 flights by 1000 aircraft. The current output is around respectively 2000 ground trajectories and 2000 OptiClimb schedules per day, ie. in average one airport movement and one aircraft climb processed every 2 seconds.
"With SkyBlocks, AirsideWatch and OptiClimb, we have been able to transform aviation data into opportunities for airports and airlines to improve their efficiency, safety and environmental impact" says Pierre Jouniaux, CEO of Safety Line. "We appreciate the strong partnership we have with Groupe ADP’s Innovation Hub and Paris-Orly Airport and look forward to working with many more airports and airlines."
