Welcome to this special end-of-year edition of the OAG Airline-Tech Innovation Radar.
Now that 2024 has come to an end, we take this opportunity to look back and reflect on a year filled with substantial technological progress within the airline and airport sectors.
For context – throughout the past year, we have diligently tracked and reported on two to five key innovation launches each month, focusing exclusively on real-world implementations by airlines, airports, and technology providers that have tangibly advanced the industry.
Today, we are excited to share insights derived from reviewing all these significant innovations of 2024.
- For our regular readers, this edition synthesizes a year’s worth of data into actionable insights and trends.
- For those new to our radar, a warm welcome—what you’ll find here is a carefully curated snapshot of genuine, implemented innovations, not theoretical ideas or proposals.
Hence, our Innovation Radar serves as a reliable barometer for actual technological adoption and application across the global aviation industry.
Let’s explore together what a year of dedicated observation has revealed about the trajectory of Airline-Tech.
2024 Airline-Tech Review: A Year of Transformative Innovations
As we reflect on the past year’s innovations, it becomes clear that 2024 was a landmark year for technological advancements within the airline industry. We identified 28 significant innovations that made a meaningful impact, each categorized via two dimensions to enhance understanding of the evolving Airline-Tech landscape.
Below, we present a visual representation of these innovations across our radar.
Each innovation has been classified into one of five sub-categories focusing on either Airline Retail or Airline Operations, reflecting the specific use case area the respective innovation impacts.
Furthermore, we assessed the innovation impact level of each entry, categorizing them as either:
- Incremental (Improve),
- Significant (Expand),
- Or Game-changing (Disrupt).
Our analysis shows a diverse spread of innovations across nearly the entire radar visual, underscoring the breadth of initiatives launched by the industry in 2024.
Remarkably, every category saw innovation except for one: Network and Revenue Management.
This absence could suggest a potential lack of visible innovation in this area, possibly due to the secretive nature of revenue management processes within airlines, which usually lack a direct consumer interface.
It is also worth noting that incremental innovations predominated, a trend that aligns with industry patterns. It is generally easier and less risky for organizations to improve existing processes with new technology than to undertake the disruption of established systems and workflows.
These initial categorizations help us appreciate the innovations themselves but also provide insights into the strategic priorities and technological trajectories of airlines in 2024.
Key Areas of Innovation Focus in 2024
As we take a deeper look at 2024’s major technological advancements, four categories stand out due to the high volume of innovation activities recorded on our radar. These categories align distinctly with either Airline Retail or Airline Operations, each driven by specific industry needs and trends.
On the Airline Retail side:
- Distribution and Ancillaries: We tracked four and five innovations, respectively in these two areas. Innovations in Distribution are heavily influenced by the airline industry’s push to simplify and enhance the flight booking experience. This includes integration with New Distribution Capability (NDC) frameworks and dynamic pricing strategies that enable richer and more customized offers to passengers.
On the Airline Operations side:
- Airport Terminal: Innovations here are fuelled by the adoption of robotics and, more importantly, advanced digital tools designed to improve passenger communications—whether for updates on delayed flights, boarding processes, or navigation through airport facilities, for example, via 3D Airport Maps.
- Flight Operations: The primary drivers for innovations in the Flight category are cost savings and environmental considerations. Efforts to reduce fuel consumption and minimize CO2 emissions have led to advances in more efficient flight routing, enhanced weather prediction technologies, and streamlined aircraft turnaround processes.
These focused areas reflect the industry’s dual commitment to enhancing customer experiences and optimizing operational efficiency. This commitment is particularly relevant given the economic uncertainties that might impact travel demand going forward.
The Convergence of Data and AI in Airline Operations
As we examined the technological innovations across the airline industry from our 2024 reviews, a distinct pattern emerged: the combination of data analytics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the driving force behind most of these advancements, particularly in operations featured on the left-hand side of our radar.
A glance at the December edition of our Airline-Tech Radar illustrates this trend, showcasing three innovations—AI-Assisted Air Traffic Control at London Heathrow, AI-Powered Baggage Management by Japan Airlines, and AI-Powered Smart-Stand Technology at Gatwick Airport. Each leverages AI’s capability to process exponentially growing data sets to enhance operational efficiency.
These patterns underscore AI’s growing role in the airline industry, especially in operations where real-time data analysis and decision-making are crucial. The importance of trustworthy data fueling such AI models cannot be overstated.
Here’s why meaningful data is paramount:
- Precision and Efficiency. AI systems require high-quality, granular data to make accurate predictions and decisions. Inaccurate or incomplete data can lead to suboptimal outcomes that may undermine the efficiency improvements these technologies are designed to deliver.
- Scalability. As AI technologies become more integrated into airline operations, the scalability of these systems will depend on the continuous flow of up-to-date, comprehensive data. This ensures that AI solutions can adapt to and learn from changing conditions and scale across different operational contexts without losing effectiveness.
- Trust and Reliability. For AI-driven innovations to gain widespread acceptance within the airline industry, stakeholders must trust the accuracy and reliability of these systems. Reliable data is the foundation of this trust, as it assures stakeholders that AI decisions are based on solid, verifiable information.
Looking ahead to 2025, the role of AI in airline operations is set to expand further, especially with the ongoing sophistication of Generative AI, which has begun to show its potential in transforming various aspects of the aviation value chain. The evolution of these AI applications will increasingly hinge on the availability of detailed, accurate data, making the management and analysis of data streams even more critical.
Ensuring access to high-quality data will be a crucial challenge for the industry, one that will dictate the pace and success of future innovations in airline tech.
At OAG, we are proud to serve as the industry’s most trusted source of aviation data. In this role, we will continue to closely monitor the market for new innovations in the year to come.
Stay tuned for what 2025 has to offer.
