The weeks leading up to and following the festive holiday season can put immense pressures on the aviation industry to operate at peak performance. As this most recent holiday season was the first largely free from coronavirus-related travel restrictions since 2019, millions of British passengers travelled via airlines in December. However, just days before Christmas and New Year’s Eve, major airlines had already faced cancellations due to external issues affecting their flight services including weather conditions and strike actions.

Network downtimes can also cause cancellations of hundreds of flights and affect thousands of travellers – ranging from small inconveniences to tremendous frustrations. Companies depend on digital networks and applications to provide accurate departure times, distribute timely updates, modify traveller details, check passengers’ luggage, reschedule connecting flights, book last-minute trips, and much more. Therefore, the impact of network downtimes onto airlines can be significant and cost companies millions of pounds in some cases.

Andy Burghes, vice president EMEA at NETSCOUT, offers to advice aviation companies to help mitigate the potential risks imposed by network downtimes during travel surges:

“Millions of British passengers expect timely flights as they travel to and from their winter holiday destinations, meaning that airlines cannot afford even a moment of downtime. It is easy to take for granted what is required to assure flight departures, arrivals, and customers services operate on schedule. Optimal application and network performance are crucial to ensure smooth operations during these busy and exceptionally stressful travel surges.

“To prevent possible downtimes, and avoid the risks that follow, scalable deep packet inspection solutions are needed to support incoming data and pinpoint the direct cause of network and application performance issues. Such solutions can provide full visibility into the performance of components necessary to enable service assurance throughout the entire travelling experience.

“This can be achieved with fast identification of applications and locations impacted by incurred downtimes. Additionally, the ability to identify the immediate source of issues is needed for airlines to reduce their mean time to repair (MTTR) and minimise the impact onto their users and customers. In doing so, airlines can ensure potential earnings and ultimately protect their businesses’ reputations.”