Unlocking savings potential of $30 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
Assaia's Turnaround Control keeps airports running smoothly by managing operations and resources in real-time. Not only are flight and weather data taken into account, but computer vision is also utilized alongside Assaia’s data from millions of turnarounds across 30+ airports - giving an accurate insight on when the aircraft will leave its gate (off-block time). This advanced system reduces taxi-in and average gate holding times, optimizes gates for incoming flights, resulting in a streamlined traffic flow at all times.
Assaia's Risk Control proactively safeguards airports by continuously monitoring the apron for unsafe behaviour. With real-time and historical safety data, staff can be trained to efficiently recognize potential threats while feeding this information into existing Safety Management Systems.
Assaia's auxiliary power unit (APU) Emissions Control provides an essential solution for the sustainability of air travel by monitoring APU usage and alerting users when APUs are not turned off in time. Ensuring emissions and kerosine burn are minimized. Furthermore, historic tracking of APU usage allows the sustainability team to understand how the different airlines perform with regards to the sustainability goals.
Benefits
- On-time-performance increased by 17% for flights managed by Assaia’s software
- Reduction in average taxi-in time by almost a minute, meaning a savings potential of more than $25 million
- 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.