Yesterday, the US National Transportation Safety Board began hearing testimony regarding what may have caused a UPS jet to crash in Birmingham, Alabama last year. Crew fatigue is considered to be one of the major factors that resulted in the crash that killed the pilot and co-pilot.
It is estimated that during the period 1950-2013 more than 50 percent of the total flight accidents in North America occurred through manual error. Incidents like the Birmingham crash, while devastating, have increased awareness of issues such as crew fatigue, which has bolstered demand for safety among all stakeholders in the aviation industry, from governments and airlines to passengers.
Regulatory bodies are searching for better ways to monitor crews, which is leading to a projected CAGR of 10.56 percent in the Global Aviation Crew Management System market from 2013-2018.
A CMS helps in estimating and analyzing several parameters such as the crews’ fatigue, ability, time efficiency, and historic flying records, which in turn optimizes the crews’ overall efficiency and productivity. The CMS will build schedules based on all these factors, with a view to improving safety.
Additionally, airlines around the world are seeing low profitability from sales, meaning they’re looking inwards to expenditure optimization to maintain profit margins. Optimizing human resources to increase operations efficiency with CMS is one way to achieve this.
High Cost and Security Concerns Hampering Market Growth
While the industry is seeing major motivation and pressure to adopt CMS, high costs associated with implementing IT in the aviation industry is forcing many airlines to establish their own in-house CMS solutions. Since in-house developments are highly customizable to meet the needs of individual airlines, they are challenging other, full-time CMS vendors.
Additionally, concerns about data security are slowing down market growth. Aviation CMS involves keeping databases comprised of huge amounts of information on air traffic, flight timing, crew member details and regulatory guidelines, and this highly sensitive information needs to be protected from all manner of cyber-threat. This is leading to some wariness among potential customers in the market.
However, increasing attention on crew fallibility is turning up the heat on airlines to find better methods for crew management. Crew fatigue is currently a major issue under the microscope, as this reduces the ability of pilots and other crew members to safely conduct flying tasks with common effects such as slowed reaction times, reduced vigilance, reduced mental abilities, memory problems, poor communication and reduced alertness. New scientific fatigue and alertness models for CMS take into account the physical alertness of crew members in order to build better schedules for flight crews.
As the industry tries to curtail the frequency and impact of flight accidents due to human error, the aviation CMS market will continue to innovate and grow over the next few years.
For more market insights, view our Global Aviation Crew Management System market 2014-2018 report.
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