Air transport technology specialist SITA has acquired airline disruption technology company Big Blue Analytics for an undisclosed amount.
Big Blue Analytics offers an artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled disruption management platform for airline operations. The company’s OCCam product works with live airline operations to evaluate the impact of a disruption on aircraft, crew, passengers and maintenance and create a recovery plan.
Disruption costs a mid-size carrier with approximately 100 aircraft up to $80 million, with Big Blue Analytics’ technology aiming to reduce that cost by up to 30%.
"Airlines have traditionally treated disruption as a fixed cost of doing business, but there is a clear opportunity to approach it differently,” said David Lavorel, CEO of SITA. “In an increasingly volatile and fast-moving environment, the ability to recover with the same agility becomes critical. The airlines that act on this first will recover faster, fly more and protect more revenue than those that wait.”
SITA already offers technology including its Mission Watch solution to more than 100 control centers globally to help carriers optimize operations.
The company is now seeking to add Big Blue Analytics’ solution to its existing AI-driven airline operations tools to predict disruptions earlier.
"This is the first step towards a much bigger intelligent operations control center vision, one where planning, monitoring and recovery come together in a single system,” said Yann Cabaret, CEO, SITA for Aircraft. “AI allows us to handle multiple constraints at once and tailor decisions to each airline in a way that was not possible before.”