These days Steve Hardgrave does all his flying from the comfort of a passenger seat rather than a cockpit, but it’s fitting that planes are still central to his career.
The former US Navy pilot has more than 4,000 hours’ flying experience under his belt. As CEO of Aircraft Management Technologies (AMT), the Dublin-based software company he co-founded, Hardgrave plans to capitalise on the opportunity presented by the airline industry’s difficulty.
The aviation sector is under pressure to reduce costs and improve performance. To combat this, many carriers are turning to principles of lean manufacturing originally developed by Toyota in the Eighties.
At its core, this philosophy involves cutting out waste from a company’s processes. Technology is ideally placed to serve this purpose, Hardgrave believes.
Flight operations — the role of getting information to and from an aircraft while docked — is notoriously paper-intensive and inefficient. Using IT can reduce or eliminate this, significantly improving a carrier’s bottom line.
Workshop results have shown impressive savings of up to US$200,000 per aircraft per year by using electronic systems.
“For low-cost airlines, a key part of their business model is turning an aeroplane around quickly, ideally within 25 minutes. They do that today, but we can improve the reliability and the cost at which they do it,” says Hardgrave.
AMT’s flagship product, called Flightman, is a software platform for sharing data between the aircraft and various airline ground systems.
“The airplane is occasion-ally connected — it’s not like a node on the network,” Hardgrave says. “You’ve got a $100m asset that’s not connected to the rest of the company’s processes. We view the ability to connect it and manage the flow of data to and from it in that challenging environment as what we’ve uniquely architected ourselves to do.”
For example, instead of waiting for part malfunctions to be discovered during a ground check, a pilot could use Flightman to communicate in real time to the maintenance crew. That way, a replacement could be prepared before the plane lands, saving time and therefore money.
Airlines have been slow to adopt technology in flight operations, partly out of conservatism and partly because the necessary infrastructure wasn’t mature enough. That’s changing and Hardgrave believes AMT is well placed to benefit.
“For what we do — data management to and from the aircraft — it’s something like a $400-to-$500m business a year, when it’s mature. Now it’s not mature yet. It’s a fraction of that at the moment,” he says.
Fortunately there have already been some early adopters. AMT’s customers range from ultra-low-cost operators like Skybus, a start-up operating from Ohio, to Singapore Airlines, Easyjet and Futura. The company hopes to announce one of the largest airlines in the US as a customer shortly.
More encouragingly for the future, Hardgrave sees additional opportunities for Flightman. Aviation is heavily regulated and the software can help an airline’s ability to comply with existing rules, as well as with new ones governing carbon dioxide emissions.
Also affected is the area of customer relationship management, where carriers could use data in the computer system to profile passengers by type and tailor services to them based on whether they are a frequent flyer. According to Hardgrave, the core product needs minimal additional development work to address these new opportunities. “It’s a logical and technically easy step for us,” he says.
