The International Air Transport Association, the global body for airlines, has launched a data tool that will help airlines collaborate in real-time during flights to avoid turbulence.
The association said the tool, Turbulence Aware, would augment an airline’s ability to forecast and avoid turbulence by pooling and sharing turbulence data generated by participating airlines as it happens.
The IATA said, “Until now, airlines have relied on pilots and weather advisories to battle turbulence and its impact on flight operations, but such tools have limitations due to inconsistencies in the level and quality of information available.
“Pilots have no standardised scale available to them when reporting an incident, other than ‘light’, ‘moderate’ or ‘severe’, but this is highly subjective due to pilot experience and aircraft size.”
According to the association, Turbulence Aware is a great example of the potential for digital transformation in the airline industry.
“Turbulence Aware will instead collect data from multiple contributing airlines—under rigorous quality control—before consolidating the information into a single, anonymised, objective source database which is accessible to participants,” the IATA said.
“The data is then turned into actionable information when fed into an airline’s dispatch or airborne alerting systems. It is the first global, real-time, detailed and objective information for pilots and operations professionals to manage turbulence,” it added.