SEA cuts taxi-in time by almost a minute per flight
Unlocking savings potential of $25 million per year with Assaia
Seattle-Tacoma International Airport (SEA) served 36.2 million passengers in 2021. Featuring 3 runways and 89 gates, SEA has the highest passenger count per gate in North America. This means they need to focus on getting the most out of their existing assets to serve their growing number of passengers. SEA needed an innovative solution to increase its capacity, achieve real-time oversight over airside operations to ensure safety, and demonstrate it was achieving its ambitions to reach Net Zero by 2050 as part of the SEA “sustainable master airport plan”.
Requirements
SEA required full situational awareness of the turnaround process in order to achieve operational efficiencies, increase capacity, reduce delays and aircraft holds, as well as improve safety on the apron. The Port of Seattle wanted to improve the overall efficiency of airport operations by optimizing the use of gates and taxiways. Furthermore, they needed to enhance the predictability of events to achieve maximum capacity, movement flow, and on-time performance (OTP).
Solution
Seattle-Tacoma International Airport leverage Assaia's TurnaroundControl to manage operations and resources in real-time. Not only is flight and weather data taken into account, but computer vision is utilized alongside Assaia’s data from turnarounds across numerous airports.
Assaia's RiskControl is leveraged to continuously monitor the apron for unsafe behaviour. Using real-time and historical safety data, staff are trained to efficiently recognize potential threats while feeding this information into existing Safety Management Systems.
Benefits
- On-time-performance increased by 17% for flights managed by Assaia’s software
- 79% reduction in average excess gate holding time
- Reduced kerosene costs for airlines by $1,000,000 per year and CO2 emissions by 1,500,000 Kgs per year.
- Using Assaia’s Predicted Off Block Time (POBT), Seattle Tacoma Airport reduced average gate holding time by 9 minutes, resulting in savings of $5 million
- Average reduction in gate departure delays for delayed flights by 3.9 minutes resulting in increased gate capacity
- Usage of POBT to optimize the arrival flow offers the potential to save SEA another $5,000,000 per year and 7,500,000 Kg of CO2 emissions per year.