Dingducky
What technology airlines can adopt to improve service and attract customers?
Talk about opening Pandora’s box!
The obvious way is by buying more efficient, reliable and safer aeroplanes. This tends to be driven by what materials are available to the manufacturer. Lighter materials that had the same strength as present ones would make a better airframe that would cost less to fly.
On the engine side it is again materials driven, give any of the engine manufacturers a material that can stand higher temperatures down the back of the engines compared to those used today and they will give you an engine that uses less fuel for the same power output.
But I suspect your sis was really thinking about what could an airline do to improve the passengers lot while using the same aeroplanes.
A few random thoughts in the order we experience hassle as passengers
Booking our trips
We have to make a choice regarding carrier, routes available, and frequencies of service without having access to all the information that is needed. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a web site where you entered your start address (home/office) and departure date and time, plus your destination address then hit enter and it listed all the options FOR THE COMPLETE TRIP (taxi/train/airport/ carrier AND let you could sort them by cost and time… you get the picture.
Reducing time spent at airports.
Would there not be occasions when you would happily pay an extra charge to be able to check in 30 mins or less before departure?
Would it not be nice to go through destination country immigration formalities DURING the flight? Its only IT stuff again. With the right data link from the aircraft to the ground it would be a doddle,
Better in flight comfort
Why not use better IT to allow pax to select the legroom they want (first class spacing with coach service?) and match the aircraft config to the pax list
Improved cabin ventilation and temperature controls FOR YOUR SEAT (I’m sure some would sooner have those than yet another seat back movie choice). Again the engineering of that sort of thing would be a doddle compared to some in-flight entertainment systems
I would tell her to think her way through a trip and a lot of ideas would pop up.
Of course one of the most important determinants of being attractive to pax is the quality of ground and air employees. Sadly too many give the impression that they would enjoy their day better if the aircraft was empty........but that’s not the stuff of technology!
Sis should remember that a good starting point for the intro to her work would be to say the task is not easy because the current industry standard is that you can go half way round the world in a day for £500. Amazing really, and its available less than 100 years since the Wright Brothers first flew a distance considerably less than the length of many airliners. You won't enjoy it but you can do it.
The final conclusion is also inevitable – customers will get what only they are prepared to pay for.
JF