Ryanair, Delta, Lufthansa: What Airline Execs Are Saying About AI, Biometrics, and Apps

25.08.2023 - 12:59 / skift.com / Air Canada / Hawaiian Airlines / United Airlines / Justin Dawes

Airlines recently finished a wave of public meetings, during which some executives shared details about internal and consumer-facing tech investments. We’ve rounded up their comments on what they’re doing with internal tech systems, AI, biometrics, airline apps, in-flight entertainment, and more. 

Air Canada has shared a number of tech investments, mostly consumer-facing, it has been making in recent months. Most recently, the company added a “cancel for any reason” tool in partnership with Hopper.

Michael Stewart Rousseau gave a brief overview of some of those investments in August: 

“Our digital investments now extend throughout the customer experience. This includes increasing the use of technology, such as expanding our biometric facial recognition pilot program for customers to board aircraft and to welcome guests into our lounges. We also continue to integrate AI into our business, most recently in our contact centers. And we’ve begun renovating cabin interiors on our narrowbody fleet, upgrading our WiFi and in-flight entertainment offerings, and launching exclusive original programs, like Mattel and Apple TV+.” 

Sean Doyle, CEO of British Airways, shared some plans during a public call in late July.

It included migration of data centers into the cloud, expected to be complete next year, as well as redeveloping the BA.com and the British Airways app. 

Regarding the British Airways app:

Shannon Okinaka, chief financial officer of Hawaiian Airlines, shared during a call in late July:

Ryanair in 2014 started an internal innovation program called Ryanair Labs. 

Edward Wilson, CEO of Ryanair, made some comments during a call in late July about progress of the program, which he said is focused on automating much of the business as it plans to add up to 300 737 MAX Jets and grow to 300 million passengers in the next decade. 

“I think we’ll be heading towards a headcount of just short of 1,000 in Labs,” Wilson said.

Half of them are focused on developing ancillary revenue streams, and the other half are focused on infrastructure and cybersecurity.

“Labs are developing all sorts of support systems for pilots, cabin crew, and engineers — things like eTechLog, where you take all that paper off the aircraft, where you’ve got flight planning iPads for pilots, and devices for cabin crew where you’re communicating things that are happening during the day,” Wilson said.

Part of that focus includes avoiding a similar fiasco as Southwest late last year, which partially stemmed from outdated staff rescheduling systems.

“If you’ve got 150 [pilots and crew] trying to contact a call center, you can never have that amount of people there, so you’ve got to solve the problems before they happen,” he said.

He added that