Air transport ~ transportation

Air transport

Objective

Air Transport Industry is one of the best prototypes of the future world where all human activities will be integrated including administrations, companies and contractors. In that respect Air Transport Industry gives an idea of the world for which PageBox has been designed.

This document does not explain how to travel at a bargain price. However it also gives background information that can help you making clever choices.

Why Air transport is special

To provide its service Air Transport Industry must combine the effort of:

people who sell the service, for instance Travel Agents;
people who operate aircrafts, airlines;
people who operate airports;
traffic controllers;
customs;
police;
...

Because this service is provided across countries, it also requires the cooperation of governments. Aircrafts are one of the most blatant applications of military research to civil needs. A company that knows how to make civil aircrafts also knows how to make military aircrafts. A civil aircraft can be used to carry troops. A pilot can pilot a military aircraft. For these reasons Air Transport activities have been subsidized, protected and heavily regulated.

Aircrafts are one century old. In the first half century progress has been extremely fast with frequent breakthroughs. In the second half century progress has been much smaller. Aircraft speed did not increase; the most significant changes, wide body and turbo fans took place at the same time as the legacy organization described below. On the other hand this is only then that Air Transport changed people life.

Like computers and Internet now, aircrafts used to incarnate modernity and to trigger the same kind of passion. Air Transport did not have to be profitable. Air Transport early became a global industry requiring the cooperation of independent organizations, private companies of different size and civil servants. These organizations communicated in a B2B model well before the 2000’. Another aspect is the weight of the legacy. With so many involved countries with so different resources, interests and timetables the big bang is never an option. The Air transport system must remain compatible with 20-years old equipments. As a consequence the Air Transport system is increasingly complex and maybe the main contribution of the computers has been to enable this growing complexity.

An optimal Air Transport system must combine conflicting interests like safety, low fares and noise acceptable for Airport neighbours. The involved organizations are different lifecycles. You can create a Travel Agency in a couple of days and an Airline in a couple of months but you must plan a new Airport twenty years in advance. Such a system needs regulations and the problem is to identify which regulations are needed and which regulations actually protect special interests.

Legacy organization

We chose to start with the Air Industry organization put in place in the 70’s and the 80’s.
This organization has roots in the Convention relating to the Regulation of Aerial Navigation signed in Paris, October 13, 1929 and in the Convention for the Unification of Certain Rules Relating to International Transportation by Air signed at Warsaw, October 12, 1929. For an update of the Warsaw convention, just read a passenger ticket.

A regulation authority was put in place, the IATA that stood for International Air Traffic Association between 1919 and WWII and stands for International Air Transport Association since 1945. See the IATA history pages for the whole story. IATA has two functions:

trade Association (technical, legal, financial, traffic services and most agency matters);
tariff Coordination (passenger fares and cargo rates, agents' commissions).

There are three things to keep in mind:

The scope of IATA encompasses all Air Transport activities.
IATA only controls International flights. However because they must comply with the IATA processes the involved parties tend to apply the same processes to domestic flights.
http://www.iata.org/ is definitely worth a visit. However do note expect to find anything for free. Nowadays much of the IATA's revenues come from selling its products and services to Member airlines, to other airlines and to other companies involved in the travel, transport and tourism industry.

Some companies were created. The most important in an historical perspective are SITA, OAG and ATPCO.

Societe Internationale des communications aeronautiques (SITA) handles shared communication means, including network and devices. For instance when you check-in or board the PC and the device used to print and process the boarding pass does not belong to the Airline. For the next departure from the same gate another airline will reuse those PC and device. Such shared equipments are often installed and maintained by SITA.

Computer Reservation systems, later called Global Distribution Systems (GDS), were created by Airlines to allow Travel Agents to make online bookings. Then four GDSs emerged from a consolidation phase, which account for 85% of CRS terminals, Sabre created by American, Worldspan created among others by Delta and Northwest, Galileo and Amadeus created by European airlines.
These super GDSs are huge transactional systems that process around 5000 requests per second from 40000 to 50000 terminals. They operate mainframe clusters running Operating Systems from IBM (TPF) and Unisys (OS/2200). They initially operated only hierarchical networks with protocols like X25 and character datastreams. Now they also support TCP and Internet access. GDSs allow making booking on airlines that accept to pay a booking fee. GDSs are more and more independent of their founding companies.

OAG stands for Official Airline Guide. This book is published by the homonymous company and contains the airline schedule information, so for every flight essentially:

the departure and destination airports,
the departure and arrival times,
the flight number.

Today the OAG maintains an airline schedules database, which holds flight details for 1000 airlines and more than 3000 airports and is updated around ten times a second.