What makes the European airport market very special?
The first thing I think of is the fact that we do not have the freedom of expanding airports by means of geographical expansion because of the geographical constraints that we've got.
The other thing as well is because a lot of the infrastructure that was established in Europe is very old. It is actually also having to cope with the existing and old infrastructure and trying to optimize that and going forward to support the airports and I think that what sets us apart is that we don't have that freedom to say:- yes we're going to build another runway or let's build a greenfield airport in this spare bit of land that we've got.
I think that's the first part, the geographical constraints that we've got but on top of that we have also a lot of social and political factors that is quite, I wouldn't say "anti-aviation" but a lot of people would like to see not a huge expansion of the aviation market and that's brought on, and we have to cope with those challenges as well and you would have recently seen for example with a third runway at Heathrow or in Munich that actually comes from a lot of external pressure from the public that don't want these things to go ahead.
We have those things to cope with as well and that contributes also to a very slow decision-making process in some instances in Europe.
I think some of the most challenging short-term aspects for us in Europe is addressing the environmental factor. That challenge remains because it's such a big topic that a lot of the time people don't adequately address it and that means if we don't start to do something now in the short term we will only start to see the delayed effects of that in the longer term so it's actually something that we cannot delay it's something that we have to address and support the airports in addressing this.
For me the short term goal is definitely for us to help to support the airports to reduce their actual environmental footprint and support them on what we can do to go forward with that.
Some of the examples for us to support the airports in some of these challenges and I mentioned the environmental one particularly is obviously to utilize our technology to support the airports in minimizing the amount of time the aircraft is either spending in the air or on the ground.
Right now our expertise lies predominantly on the ground, optimizing how that how fast the aircraft can get from the runway to the actual stand and the opposite way around, and then also via other concepts that's been introduced like the A-CDM processes it's also creating a collaborative decision-making process within Europe and that also means that it will reduce the amount of time that an aircraft is potentially spending in the air based on some decision making process either lack of a gate available at the destination airport means it's staying rather on the ground rather than circling in the air for ages.
Our contribution is predominantly based around providing the airport with the tools to aid this decision-making and then other tools to speed up the processes at the airport.
22 май 2019
