One of the things to note from all of these threads is the issue of SLA’s within GH contracts. Something which the commercial people spend hours negotiating and then fail to implement any effective system to measure those SLA’s accurately or in a media that allows sharing of the information. The Airline/ground handling arena is way behind in terms of technology and systems for measuring/recording performance and SLA’s. Most operations still rely on pen and paper to capture timings/performance of events (if at all) and then only pay any attention to data related to late departing flights where in reality other parts of the service or other service providers may be failing to deliver continuously. This is never picked up as an on-time departure covers up their failure to deliver to their SLA. As said in an earlier thread (by Greuzi) the logistics industry really did start improving once they grasped the need for collecting accurate performance data and sharing that data between suppliers/vendors in order for them all to see where the improvements could be made and what the acceptable level of resource/cost was for providing a service to the agreed SLA. Transparency (also as alluded to by Greuzi) of performance/costs will allow the GHA to work with the airline and for them all to see that the majority of the time they are delivering the required service rather than at present where they only ever discuss the ‘failures’. This would also help to remove the ‘blame’ culture that infests most ground handling scenarios. There are some new solutions out there (such as Avtura’s RATT product) which take advantage of new technology used within the logistics industry to monitor/capture the ground handling process at aircraft side which then provide reusable data to GHA, Airline and other 3rd party suppliers, both in real-time during the process (which allows for discussion re planning ETD as mentioned in an earlier thread by 42psi) and after the event for analysis/process improvements. Yes, I know the guys who developed it so I’m biased but accurate transparent measurement of SLA’s/Performance really is the way ahead if GHA’s are to claw their way back to profit and respect from their airline customers for the service they do provide.