"Sita" Launches a system of advance notification of flight delays
Geneva, February 10, 2017 – SITA International revealed the launch of the API for advance notification of flight delays, which allows airlines and airports to have early access to potential delays, enabling work teams to move quickly and contain their effects before they escalate.
The step comes in light of the increase in air traffic and the shrinking margins of operational recovery. The losses resulting from delays go beyond just disruption to flight schedules, and include wasted time and effort of ground teams, gate disruptions, exhausted crew hours, as well as passengers missing subsequent flights, and the accompanying additional costs, cases of dissatisfaction, and potential damage to the reputation of airlines.
The International Air Transport Association (IATA) estimates that air traffic flow management delays in Europe alone have cost airlines and passengers 16.1 billion euros over the past decade.
Most of this cost results not from the delay itself, but from the lack of rapid information needed to adjust plans, reallocate resources, and protect subsequent flight schedules before the disruption worsens.
To fill this gap, SITA designed an application programming interface that relies on the latest departure information and operational mechanisms based on the expected duration of the flight, in order to anticipate potential delays and automatically notify arrival airports.
The new solution directly provides these airports with automated early alerts and real-time updates about delayed or disrupted flights, giving work teams at airlines and arrival airports sufficient time to adjust operational plans early, thus reducing the chain impacts on aircraft preparation operations, organizing crew schedules, allocating gates, and subsequent passenger flights.
Martin Smillie, Senior Vice President of Communications and Data Sharing at SITA, said that most disruptions result from delays being detected by the teams responsible for managing them, and arrival airports across the industry are still forced to address these disruptions rather than proactive intervention, so the new API came to change this paradigm by providing reliable signals early, which allows informed operational decisions to be made in a timely manner, and reduces the negative impact on passengers, the level of costs and the performance of the airline network.
The new API adopts secure, encrypted communication patterns based on the HTTP protocol, and eliminates the need for frequent schedule requests and manual updates, as it sends automated alerts to travelers about the possibility of their flight being delayed 15 minutes beyond its scheduled time, giving work teams sufficient time to adjust passenger procedures, aircraft service, and subsequent flight plans.
The Flight Delay Advance Notification API is available as a subscription service, and is part of SITA’s portfolio of dedicated flight information APIs.
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