Uncategorized

COVID-19 has fundamentally disrupted schedule planning. Are the days for seasonal planning and slot management over? Are your work processes and software tools adaptive to today’s demands and accelerated timeframe? Given the high degree of demand uncertainty in the market, having better data closer to the day of operation drives the desire to shorten the…

Demand will be lower. Schedule changes will be more drastic. Many flights will be unprofitable.  And, the way airlines manage schedules will change.  The tools airlines use will need to change too. How will scheduling and tools change? BOOKINGS – NOT PROFIT FORECASTING Flight forecasting systems will be mostly useless for some time.  There will…

As Zulu celebrates 5 years in the market, our founding purpose has become more important today in these turbulent times of uncertainty and rapid change. Zulu was started with the purpose of bringing big airline capabilities to every airline, large and small, using cloud technology and flexible development plus Zulu’s expertise in scheduling best practices.…

Zulu 3.0 includes a suite of planning modules for the fast-changing conditions airlines are facing today in planning and managing their schedules as the industry recovers: Our scheduling and slot management platform is mature, fast, flexible and easy-to-use with all the capabilities that planning teams need to work quickly on change requests. Zulu has many…

Zulu Airline Systems provides a cloud-native airline schedule planning SaaS product to commercial airlines for organizing thousands of flights into optimized lines of flying and for actively managing the regular changes that happen.  The ability of the Bryntum scheduler https://bryntum.com to render such a large number of flights layered with the flight and ground time…

Planning Now for a More Fluid Future Why a More Fluid Future? After “events” like SARS-1 or Sept 11, people could get back to making future plans in much the same way they had before. In contrast, today’s pandemic has an uncertain timeframe and major long term effects. With the uncertainty in market demand, competition…

The first thing airline schedulers tell us they need to make decisions is “good data” to know which changes are better than others.  They would like to have: profitability data by flight segment, current booking data from the reservations system (daily update), and forecast revenue for each flight. Some schedulers also mention that they would…

A popular interpretation of the Chinese word for crisis, “Weiji,” is a combination of danger and opportunity.  Politicians from John F. Kennedy, who experienced a nuclear missile crisis, to Al Gore in his description of global climate change have used this meme to help communicate the situation and encourage the right actions.  However, most language…

Why has airline forecasting been so difficult?  Airlines have worked for a generation with explicitly programmed optimizers and forecast algorithms to obtain some measure of predictability in their planning. On paper, optimization appears to be a panacea, if you have very few constraints and a fairly simple business model. In practice, the complexity of operational…

Many major airports around the world are operating at or well beyond their design capacity at peak periods of each day. With the robust projections in air travel demand, this constraint is affecting on-time performance and growth for airlines as well as customer satisfaction with airport services such as check-in, security, immigration, baggage handling, etc.…

Has it become automatic?  Is your legacy software vendor framing your contract renewal discussion as a negotiation to lock-in a price, while promising that their old system will meet your business needs and avoid a need for change? Would you sign a long-term contract for outdated equipment if an economical, higher performing, and more flexible option was…

  Why Change Software? There are a lot of rational arguments for change, but the fact is the human brain makes us quite indifferent to most of them.  It’s not until we see something we can NOT NOT do that our indifference is blown away and we are open to change[1]. [1]Acknowledgement to Merrick Furst…