Air New Zealand has a proud track record of digital innovation.
It was the first airline to introduce automated check-in kiosks and an early adopter of cloud computing.
This was in the background when CEO Greg Foran and the company’s leadership team began a strategy review. The mission to become the world’s leading digital airline emerged from that process as part of digital dexterity, one of the airline’s seven strategic pillars.
Ravishankar says the digital dexterity strategy is based on the premise the company was doing a good job of being an airline with a digital department that supports providing a better customer experience, making services run more efficiently and improving safety. “Then we asked ourselves: ‘What if we started thinking of ourselves less as an airline with a digital department but as a digital business that happens to be in the aviation sector’?”
Air New Zealand’s mid-sized status helps here.
Explains Ravishankar: “We have all the complexity of a full-service carrier, but we’re not so big that you can’t wrap your arms around the company. We have the ability to be more agile and to deliver new capabilities while other people are still talking about it. We’ve shown over the years what we can do when we put our minds to it.”
There are other advantages: “We operate in a market where we have a good working relationship with the airport companies and with the regulators. We are in an ecosystem where we can move faster than rivals in other jurisdictions. And our experience during Covid brought us closer to government agencies like Customs, the Ministry for Primary Industries and the Department of Internal Affairs. Then there is the unique New Zealand Inc opportunity to reimagine the whole travel experience.”
There’s another motivation for moving fast down the path to building a digital airline.
Air New Zealand can position itself as an innovation testbed where new ideas get a real-world trial. It can develop intellectual properties that other airlines and organisations around the world could find compelling.
The Covid pandemic was brutal for the aviation sector with service cancellations and other restrictions. Ravishankar says during that period and the post-Covid rebuild, thoughtful application of technology helped make Air New Zealand more resilient. “The companies that survive are not necessarily the strongest or the fittest, but the ones that can adapt best to change. Technology certainly increases our adaptability”.
Looking forward, the airline is asking what does the future of sustainable aviation look like? Our nation’s relative geographic isolation makes this disproportionately more important than in other countries; you can’t, for example, catch a fast train to New Zealand. Ravishankar says Climate Change Commission chairman Dr Rod Carr suggested that sustainable aviation could be to the future New Zealand what refrigeration was to the early 1900s: “a disproportionate value creator for the country”.
Other innovations in the pipeline include a fully paperless flight deck. Air NZ plans to bring that plan to life early in the New Year. It will digitise the pilot experience that integrates with what the plane provides and what happens on the ground.
Air New Zealand’s current digital projects
Meetings in the Metaverse
Ravishankar says Air New Zealand has found that it’s possible to lose a lot of collaboration when there’s a meeting with people in the office connecting with others who are remote or working from home. To get around this, the airline has built a Metaverse copy of the company’s new building now being remodelled at Auckland Airport. The idea is to create a level playing field for employees as everyone adapts to the new hybrid work environment.
He says that for now, the airline is exploring the idea of a Metaverse workspace. “At the moment we don’t know if this is the answer, but we’re trying to figure out if it could be the answer”.
Air New Zealand general manager digital Richard Hollebon says the airline sees potential for this technology in maintenance and engineering. The business already uses virtual reality in its training centres.
Air NZ mobile app
Earlier this year, the Air New Zealand mobile phone app went through a complete rebuild. There is an updated user interface, but while the look is refreshed, the app still functions in a familiar way. The new build means the airline can roll out new features without requiring users to reinstall new versions of the app. This illustrates what digital dexterity means from the customer’s point of view.
Product management specialist Ilya Zharenikov says: “It’s all about speed to market. Our deployment frequency is almost daily, they may be small fixes that are not visible to the user, but we want to get new things to customers really quickly.”
Luke Coxhead, who is also a product management specialist, says: “We’ve stripped out some of the logic from the front end into a mobile experience layer, which gives us the opportunity to be more responsive to customer feedback and operational feedback around deploying new changes and features”.
Coxhead says the airline knows the app is much loved, but until now the focus has all been on the day of travel with check-in, a boarding pass and notifications. “But for us to meet our ambitions, it needs to go beyond the day of travel, we need to look holistically at the customer journey through the entire process, preparing for travel and supporting post-travel requirements”. At the time of writing the development team is preparing a feature that lets fliers check the status of their baggage on any Air NZ or Star Alliance flight. It will provide precise details of the last time the baggage tag was scanned as it moves through the system.
Biometric boarding pass
Passengers travelling via Los Angeles Airport can now board plans without needing a boarding pass. Automated airport kiosks and boarding gates can now use face recognition to verify passengers.
The airline uses the same face recognition data that is used by the United States’ Customs and Border Protection agency. Air NZ says it is in discussion with other authorities to extend the biometric technology to other airports.
Automated, paperless flight planning
Air New Zealand used the same flight planning software for 25 years and what A320 pilot Captain Matt Harrington describes it as a “highly manual process”. When the company behind that software announced it was sunsetting the despatch manager, Air NZ set about developing a replacement.
Harrington says the new flight planning system automates many of the manual processes, “it assesses the airport for suitability and it uses business rules. It will determine whether the airport is suitable to be used and then it does the whole route, producing a flight plan without any intervention from a flight planner.” Along the way it will create a dynamic route based on the weather and winds for that flight, if there is a restricted area, it will automatically route around that. It can automatically calculate the fuel required for a flight based on the winds and the route.
Today pilots still get paper flight plans delivered to the cockpit. If there’s a change to the plan, they must wait for a new one — in some cases they can print new plans onboard, but that still means a delay. Soon that will change to digital delivery with pilots using a custom-made iPad app with colour-coded information highlighting things that need special attention such as routes around air turbulence.
Using AI for scheduling
Until now flight scheduling has been done manually. It’s a complex job that means juggling planes, crews, gates and other resources. There are short time windows between take-offs and landing where planes need to load passengers and baggage, change crews, refuel and deal with catering. One broken link in the chain can ripple through the system causing delays elsewhere.
Mike Parsons, general manager digital says the better the airline can forecast and react to change, the more chance it has of reducing delays. It is now using artificial intelligence to help streamline the speed and quality of scheduling decisions.
“It’s a complex, interrelated network where factors come together. If there is one thing we know computers are good at, it is sorting through these things and making calculations.”
Nikhil Ravishankar
The Air New Zealand chief digital officer joined the airline from Vector in 2021 where he was also the CDO.
While in that role he led the lines company’s digital transformation programme.
Before joining Vector, he was managing director at Accenture New Zealand and Telecom New Zealand’s (now Spark) head of technology strategy.
