Welcome to Short Haul

Vistair’s Short Haul is a bite size look at numerous aspects of our business with the intention of keeping you in touch with our operations, our product improvements, developments and implementations.

At Vistair, I believe that by sharing information on what we are doing enables everyone i.e. you, to better understand our thinking and how Vistair is trying to support the operational efficiency drivers in our industry.

Equally, it provides you with an opportunity to see the developments taking place within your area of interest and through your feedback help us to use that knowledge to enhance our products and services in line with your needs.

This edition includes a short summary on how Vistair is evolving, both from a people perspective and our working environment. Excitingly we’ve got some recent client renewals along with new accreditation and product developments.

As with everything we do at Vistair we’d welcome your feedback and any thoughts that would help to make Vistair, this news forum and the future technology better.

Thanks for reading.

Ian Herbert, CEO

VISTAIR OPERATIONS - A NEW WORKPLACE

Vistair’s home is changing… and for the better! Building a new home can be fraught with tension, bad humour and awful colour selections but here at Vistair we are hopeful that our refurbishment, in progress as we write, avoids these pitfalls.

Our new home is being developed to provide an environment that is fit for a world class team and fully able to provide a world class service for our clients… although parts of the building look less appealing at present!

The refurbishment is planned to be completed by April 3rd following which we will once again be able to roll out the red carpet and welcome our customers to our base.

VISTAIR OPERATIONS NEW FACES

Vistair support continues to move at pace and since 2015, 33 new colleagues have joined the team. This has provided increased bandwidth to both the DocuNet and SMS teams; and, with a new office in the making, we’ll even have space to let them sit down.

We are very pleased to announce that, from the 3rd March, we will have a full time DocuNet product Specialist to assist our growing list of clients with the industry’s leading flight operations technical publications managed service. If you are already using DocuNet then you may be familiar with Andy Wiles who will be taking up this role. Andy will assist with all aspects of the product and service set including helping our clients to get even more value out of their investment in DocuNet.

In the next Short Haul we’ll get Andy to make a contribution which will hopefully become a regular spot.

CYBER ACCREDITATION

The focus upon cyber security and assurance has never been more important. Such is Vistair’s understanding of data management that in late 2016 Vistair worked to achieve 3rd party accreditation of the UK’s Government-backed Cyber Essentials scheme.

This scheme, through its assurance framework, offers a mechanism to demonstrate that Vistair has taken the necessary precautions to protect and verify its platforms through 3rd party accreditation and that we have adequate controls that we implement and validate continuously.

While the Cyber Essentials scheme is designed to ensure a minimum level of security, Vistair’s platform has many more controls and measures in place to protect the data we hold. No small achievement the result of which makes us military standard in terms of security. Our clients can sleep soundly at night knowing that their data is both protected and well cared for.

CUSTOMER & PRODUCT NEWS SMS UPDATES

Just how many passwords does one man need?

The answer as we all know…is just one. Single sign-on is a requirement for most organisations in the public and private sectors with the aviation industry being no different. At Vistair making it easier for users to gain access to our SMS suite equates to making it easier for them to lodge and monitor safety and risk issues.

Over the last few months Vistair has completed several successful integrations with our clients’ Single-Sign-On solutions, thereby solving some of the ‘memory’, ownership and security issues of multiple passwords.

We are now able to support any system that uses Security Assertion Mark-up Language (‘SAML’) -based authentication, including Microsoft’s Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS). This allows your users to use their corporate username and password to access Vistair’s systems, thereby, reducing the number of passwords required and simplifying the administrative processes.

Single Sign-On has already been rolled out to BA and Aer Lingus with UAT testing taking place at a number of our other clients.

CUSTOMER & PRODUCT NEWS CUSTOMER UPDATES

In the past few months several of our key customers took the decision to continue or indeed increase their working partnership with Vistair Systems.

Air Iceland renewed and expanded its licence to use Vistair’s safety, compliance and risk-management software solutions. The airline, headquartered in Reykjavik, in addition to signing a new licence agreement to use the latest “Enterprise” version of SafetyNet, has also taken on Vistair’s QualityNet and RiskNet software solutions, giving the airline the ultimate in state of the art oversight of its risk based safety management operation.

Sharon Kerr, Quality & Safety Manager at Air Iceland, said: “The obvious reason for our long-lasting partnership with Vistair is because, quite simply, they provide us with the very best safety management tools available which keep us safe and compliant with the regulatory authorities.”

In addition, our long-standing relationship with easyJet continues to progress. Renowned as one of the world’s safest airlines, easyJet, has signed a 5-year renewal of its agreement to use Vistair’s market-leading safety management software solution, SafetyNet.

Proven to increase incident occurrence reporting by more than 65 per cent, all 11,000 staff and crew at easyJet have access to the SafetyNet interface via web, EFB and mobile devices; making immediate reporting of occurrences simple, accessible and efficient. SafetyNet creates a safety culture, upon which the whole organisation pivots.

Jim Pegram, Head of Safety Performance at easyJet, said: “For a long time now Vistair has been an exemplary business partner to us, working closely and collaboratively with our own in-house experts to create new and innovative ways of deploying safety reporting.”

In further news, CrewNet, our ‘read and sign’ application has now been implemented at both BA and Air Arabia.

DOCUNET UPDATES

As usual, it has been a busy couple of months for the DocuNet team. With a current responsibility for maintaining over 2000 manuals in over 50 airlines the team has again met 100% of all hard completion deadlines (99.4% for past 12 months) proving once again that DocuNet continues to deliver head and shoulders above all competing solutions. This impressive performance included the successful completion of the Emirates training manual amendments which resulted in only one tiny typo edit after updating over 600 pages of new structured data from the team.

The team also supported both Monarch and DHL in enhancing their document sets. The Monarch project involved an update of the existing manual format following industry best practice, along with the introduction of a new style guide. This affected Monarch’s complete manual suite (c40 manuals) including the A320 document set.

The DHL work involved some technical changes to the Boeing 757 documents with a particular emphasis upon changing the colour sets so that they were more easily visible for pilots.

Finally January marks the start of our journey with the Boeing 737 MAX as we have started work for Fly Dubai on our first document set for this fleet. This also will subsequently fall in line with our twice yearly maintenance and update of all Boeing documents, and subsequent additional revisions.

INDUSTRY NEWS

AIRBUS RALLIES LATE TO TAKE SALES CROWN FROM BOEING

Airbus' and Boeing's competition for sales continued throughout 2016. Both manufacturers confirmed strong figures but Airbus took the 2016 award with 731 net orders compared to Boeing’s 668

http://uk.businessinsider.com/airbus-boeing-sales-deliveries-2016-2017-1

AIR TRANSPORT WORLD EDITORIAL – THE LONG GAME: RISE OF ULTRA EFFICIENT AIRLINERS

2017 is shaping up to be another good year for the narrowbody, especially the new-generation of ultra-efficient airliners. Large orders have been placed for the Airbus A320neo and Boeing 737 MAX.

http://atwonline.com/opinions/editorial-long-game

WHY ARE AIRLINES SLOW TO ENTER THE DIGITAL AGE

We are at the doorstep of a new industrial revolution. The “Industrial Internet” or “Internet of Things” (IoT) is set to disrupt many industries and unlock new levels of value and productivity for the companies who adopt. Industries such as aviation should be the first adopters for a number of reasons.

Aviation is a capital-intensive industry and as in oil and gas and in medical services, downtime is very costly. The IoT has the potential to improve equipment uptime. Also, aviation is a data-intensive industry. So why is aviation slow to move forward in this area?

http://aviationweek.com/commercial-aviation/opinion-why-are-airlines-slow-enter-digital-age?

ANOTHER STRONG YEAR FOR PASSENGER DEMAND

The International Air Transport Association (IATA) announced full-year global passenger traffic results for 2016 showing demand (revenue passenger kilometres or RPKs) rose 6.3% compared to 2015 (or 6.0% if adjusted for the leap year). This strong performance was well ahead of the ten-year average annual growth rate of 5.5%. Capacity rose 6.2% (unadjusted) compared to 2015, pushing the load factor up 0.1 percentage points to a record full-year average high of 80.5%.

http://www.iata.org/pressroom/pr/Pages/2017-02-02-01.aspx

KEY VISTAIR STATISTICS

We are proud to share our superb 2016 and more recent performance indicators, all of which highlight the high levels of Vistair service and performance.

• 100% completion on hard deadlines for all DocuNet projects (January 2017)

• 3502 Support Tickets were completed in 2016 with 3613 received during the year

• 9761 DocuNet Tasks were completed in 2016 with 99.4% of all hard deadlines met over the past 12 months