Over the recent decades, we’ve witnessed increasingly unpredictable events affect all aspects of air travel. Utility outages, weather phenomena, job/trade actions and security threats are all causes of disruption to normal air travel. When disruptions of any type affect airlines they cause irregular operations. Irregular operations can also happen due to planned events, like construction projects or gate modifications.
These events have adversely affected the global aviation network and cause airlines to modify and adjust their normal operations to accommodate unexpected schedule changes. The capacity to recover from these events, whether planned or unplanned, determines the resiliency of an organization. In the case of the aviation industry, both airlines and airports must work together to provide resiliency in the face of uncertainty while continuing to offer the best possible passenger experience.
THE IMPACT OF IRREGULAR OPERATIONS
With increased flight demands and limited numbers of gates, airlines have limited flexibility to adjust to unforeseen conditions. An irregular operations event can have immediate and severe, negative effects on an airline. An event at any one airport with a single plane can ripple through hundreds of airports serving thousands of commercial aircraft. The impacts of a single event are felt on local, regional and even national levels — sometimes for months, or even years.
