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Toulouse, France, 25th August 2021

⎯ New Icelandic start-up airline operating Airbus A321neo
⎯ NAVBLUE’s full Plan & Control suite for optimized entry into service mid 2021

PLAY, the Iceland based start-up airline that started operations in June 2021, has signed a long-term deal with NAVBLUE for its innovative OCC suite. NAVBLUE’s Plan & Control suite covers Flight Planning, Flight Following, Operations Control, Crew Management and Aircraft Performance. Additionally, PLAY has also signed on for NAVBLUE’s electronic flight bag solution Flysmart+.

N-Ops & Crew from NAVBLUE will enable PLAY to manage long term schedule and crew planning as well as day-of-operations with a single highly-configurable system within one application (schedule planning, day-of-ops management, crew scheduling, crew payroll, crew planning and crew qualifications).

NAVBLUE’s N-Flight Planning and N-Tracking are solutions that empower flight dispatchers and flight
followers with optimized routes and Aircraft Situational Display (ASD) to optimize PLAY’s flight planning and enroute operations.

PLAY launched operations in June 2021, operating Airbus A321 aircraft. The airline plans to expand into North America later next year and increase its European destinations to 10 over the next three years.

Arnaud Voermans, Vice President of Plan and Control Software Solutions and Services at NAVBLUE, said: “PLAY is a start-up airline with a great expansion plan into the future. By signing for NAVBLUE’s full OCC suite, the airline will ensure smooth entry into service through a unique end-to-end operations solution. This partnership marks the first step in PLAY’s growing plan to assure all operation related events are automated and optimized from end-to-end”.

Finnbogi Karl Bjarnason, Director Flight Operations, at PLAY, said: “When we first started our preparations for the airline start-up, we initiated a demanding RFP to various software developers, both newly developed as well, established organizations. After reviewing the results, NAVBLUE was a very easy choice, with a robust yet dynamic product with knowledgeable people supporting the infrastructure of their platforms. I sincerely look forward working closely with NAVBLUE in the future”.

About NAVBLUE: NAVBLUE is an Airbus Services company, wholly owned by Airbus, and dedicated to Flight Operations & Air Traffic Management Solutions. NAVBLUE provides digital solutions and services, and supports both civil and military environments, on the ground and onboard any aircraft and offers expertise in a range of areas, including digital cockpit operations, Operations Control Centre (OCC) systems, Flight Ops Engineering, Performance Based Navigation (PBN) and Air Traffic Management (ATM). NAVBLUE employs 480 employees spread across Canada,
USA, UK, France, and Thailand, with representatives in several other countries across the globe.

The market is in a need of an easy to use, allowing throughout integrations application that automates workflows, even allowing a zero click loadsheet. Therefore, Evionica decided to invest in developing a new weight and balance software that will be available end of September to meet this demand.

Below you will find an overview of Airlines opinion on nowadays requirements.

*Qualitative interview with 176 Airlines containing opinion from Ground Ops, Flight Ops and Operation Control Center (OCC)

“After I received a personal demonstration of the new application, I can say that it is quicker, more intuitive although even till now our entire ground handling network was very satisfied with the simplicity of the current system and continuous automation of workflows” said Maciej Zochowski, Regional Ground Operations Manager, Wizz Air

How Evionica will provide the value to the Airlines Operations?

1. Loadsheet in a matter of seconds, where you can generate a Loadsheet just in 60 seconds. Integrations with Flight Scheduling, Flight Planning, DCS, Performance and EFB Application will increase workflow efficiency. No matter what Vendor Evionica will find a way to integrate.
2. Reduce Costs on operations. With the business model “pay as you fly” here you will have the ideal fit in today’s dynamic environment. Additional flights will operate on time and Weight & Balance delay will be zero.
3. Safe Process. You can retrieve any action and additionally there is no space for human error in the software.
4. Effortless implementation. There is no installation required and system training takes only 60 minutes instead of weeks.
5. Available always and everywhere. The Application can be launched on any device either offline or online and as Airline you don’t have to rely on airport infrastructure.

“My team achieved another important objective during this challenging time but investments in digitalisation and automation of processes is a key to success. Airlines will appreciate our competitive and valuable services. I am really proud of my team making this happen” said Mateusz Godun, CEO, Evionica

About Evionica

Evionica delivers intelligent solutions to improve the operations of companies in the aviation industry. It offers features software for Weight & Balance calculations, as well as a range of systems to enhance the pilot training process. Evionica provides its services on all continents for clients such as Wizz Air, Lufthansa Aviation Training, LOT Polish Airlines and Gulf Aviation Academy.

About Wizz Air

Wizz Air is a European ultra-low-cost airline with its head office in Budapest. The airline serves many cities across Europe, as well as some destinations in North Africa and the Middle East. It currently serves 70 destinations and 44 countries. In 2019 the airline transported 39.8 million passengers. The fleet includes several types from the A320 family of jets.

Transavia France, the low-cost airline of the AIR FRANCE KLM Group, operates scheduled and charter flights out of France (Orly, Nantes, Montpellier and Lyon) and the Netherlands (Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Eindhoven and Groningen) to more than 109 destinations, primarily in Europe and Northern Africa. 

Reducing environmental impact has always been a priority for Transavia France.

“We take our responsibility to reduce the negative effects of flying on the environment. We do this by reducing our CO2 emissions and minimising waste. Our target is to reduce Transavia’s CO2 emissions by 35% in 2030.” Source >>

In this interview, Emmanuel Cachia, Director of Flight Operations at Transavia France explains how they lower flight footprint by using SkyBreathe®, an eco-flying solution. Implemented in just 1 month, it helped them save about 10,000 tons of CO2 emissions in 2019, representing between 4 and 5% of reduction of their total fuel consumption. 

[Video transcript]

“Transavia is a low-cost carrier so the implementation of this tool is not our core business. We asked OpenAirlines to do everything for us. We just provided them some information to do the link between their system and our IT network and after one month, everything was done in total autonomy.

Our pilots like SkyBreathe®, it’s very clear and friendly, it’s very easy for them to replay their flights and to identify the areas of improvement and thus to have a better eco-flying, which is a pilot skill today.

In 2019, they save, with eco-flying about 3200 tons of fuel in Transavia France so it’s between 4 and 5% of our total fuel consumption”.

Interview Anaïk Trihoreau, Product Owner at OpenAirlines.

A few words about her background: she has 17 years of experience in software production in the Aeronautical Industry. She has been working at OpenAirlines for 11 years, providing expertise in software development, customer support, and product definition.

What is the SkyBreathe® Emissions module?

Every year, international airlines must fill up two reports about their CO2 emissions and fuel burn:

• For all airlines flying international: Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation (CORSIA). CORSIA is « a carbon offset and carbon reduction scheme to lower CO2 emissions for international flights, to curb the aviation impact on climate change » ⁽¹⁾. ICAO adopted CORSIA in October 2016 as one of the four pillars used to reduce aviation net CO2 emissions. To learn more about CORSIA >>
• For all airlines flying in the Europe Union: European Union EU Emissions Trading System (EU-ETS). EU-ETS is « a cornerstone of the EU’s policy to combat climate change and its key tool for reducing greenhouse gas emissions cost-effectively » ⁽²⁾.

The SkyBreathe® Emissions module is dedicated to help users to fill up faster both the official CORSIA and EU-ETS declarations and to monitor the data gaps and their causes at a glance.

SkyBreathe® Emissions module homepage. Identify data quality at a glance.

Why SkyBreathe® Emissions module?

For an airline, it is a challenge to list all the flights and compute each of their fuel consumption, identify out-of-scope flights, reach less than 5% of flights with “data gaps,” and fill up the expected reports. The task is tedious and time-consuming, leading to mistakes. In addition, the verification step by an external entity is usually a source of stress.

As an expert in collecting fuel data from airlines, based on our SkyBreathe Analytics eco-flying solution, and because we have a good and up-to-date knowledge of the official rules for the declarations, it has been natural to help airline professionals with such reports. We offer a tool for computing and compiling the emissions in one click to ease the declarations filling in.

What are the top 4 key features of the module?

• Reports ready to copy-paste in the declarations, using all five methods proposed by CORSIA and the two methods for EU-ETS
• Automated alerts raised on missing or erroneous data (“data gaps”)
• Automatic correction with the official tools CERT and SET
• Export of flights and alerts to fulfill specific demands during the external verification audit
  

What are the top benefits of the module?

• Reduced margin of error thanks to scope and exemptions check: which flights must be declared, with up-to-date rules about countries, flight service types, maximum takeoff weight, etc.
• Alert of gaps all along the year to anticipate the last-minute issues
• A user-friendly interface to quickly fill out the final declaration
• Autonomous data integration in a few minutes

Get alerts on missing and inconsistent data for CORSIA and EU-ETS.

How does it work?

It’s very simple! The user just needs to extract data from its airline information system in a specified format, then upload it in the SkyBreathe® Emissions module to get the results in a few minutes and check the data gaps.

In case of missing data, it is easy to identify the involved flights. Then, the user fixes the gap in the airline system and starts the process again.

Our users usually run this process once a year on the eve of the deadline to declare. Ideally, we recommend doing this once a month to fix data all along the year. You probably know the quote from Jez Humble “If it hurts, do it more often, and bring the pain forward.”

At the end of the year, the user must upload the full-year data in the Emissions module and copy-paste the generated reports in the CORSIA and EU-ETS templates.

Predefined reports ready to copy-paste for CORSIA and EU-ETS

Air Serbia, the Republic of Serbia’s national airline, announced the implementation of SkyBreathe® eco-flying solution to pursue their commitment to greener aviation.

SkyBreathe® is an innovative eco-flying solution that features an Artificial Intelligence engine with cutting-edge algorithms to automatically analyze large amounts of flight data and assess operational efficiency improvements at the fleet, route, and individual flight stage level. The Big Data solution integrates multiple data sources for each flight in a single database. Then it computes achieved and potential savings taking into account the actual flight conditions, such as weather, flight path, Air Traffic Control, and payload, to produce highly accurate fuel metrics.

This digital solution enables the airline to quickly implement the most appropriate best practices to reduce fuel consumption and CO2 emissions from 2 to 5%, which is the core focus of airlines as fuel accounts for 30% of operational expenses.

“Care for the environment represents an inseparable part of our everyday operations, and we are satisfied that the initiatives we launched are yielding results. During 2019, we have managed to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by almost three thousand tons. Our pilots are the main contributors to our fuel consumption reduction because the procedures toward this goal are generally undertaken during flights. The use of this mobile application will further enhance the optimization process, and we are looking forward to every new step toward a more sustainable future of the airline industry.”

Duncan Naysmith, CEO of Air Serbia.

“Today, we are pleased to see that this trend to favor a clean recovery is getting more momentum everywhere in the world. Air Serbia has launched its fuel-efficiency program years before this crisis. Still, despite the unprecedented disruption that the Covid-19 catastrophe has caused on airline operations, it is significant that Air Serbia has chosen this moment to push its fuel-efficiency program to the next level. We are proud that they have chosen SkyBreathe® to increase their competitiveness while reducing their carbon footprint, joining the greenest airlines in the world.”,

Alexandre Feray, CEO of OpenAirlines.

Air Serbia joins more than 45 airlines adopting SkyBreathe® to improve their fuel efficiency, including Air France, Norwegian, Malaysia Airlines, Atlas Air.

About Air Serbia:

Air Serbia has been a leader in air transport since the company was founded in 1927. Air Serbia already flies or plans flying to more than 60 destinations in Europe, the Mediterranean, the Middle East, North America and Africa, both in passenger and freight traffic. They offer flights to international destinations in Asia, Australia, North America and Africa through Etihad Airways and other partner airlines.

Air Serbia’s priority is to provide exceptional quality of service to their passengers. They aim to give their company’s customers the utmost comfort while traveling, regardless of the class in which they fly.

More information: https://www.airserbia.com/

About OpenAirlines:

OpenAirlines provides consulting and software solutions for airlines flight operations. Since 2006, OpenAirlines has been on a mission to help airlines save 2-5% of their fuel consumption with its innovative SkyBreathe® solution. The software uses Big Data algorithms and automatically analyses the large amount of available data in flight data recorders to assess flights’ efficiency.

Today, more than 45 airlines all over the world use OpenAirlines’ software.

In 2019, their customers saved more than 150 million USD and 590,000 tons of CO2.

More information: www.openairlines.com 

SITA takes the lead in deploying predictive data analytics for co-innovating with customer airlines and airports to reduce CO2 emissions and improve fuel savings.

SITA, the global IT provider for the air transport industry, today announced the acquisition of Safety Line S.A.S., the Paris based start-up specializing in digital solutions for aviation safety and efficiency.

This acquisition will strengthen SITA’s Digital Day of Operations portfolio, helping airlines drive more efficiencies and fuel savings around the aircraft while taking immediate and sustainable steps to reduce their carbon footprint.

With air transport accounting for about 3% of the worldwide carbon emissions, there is growing pressure on airlines to reduce their overall emissions. At the same time the COVID-19 pandemic requires airlines to make their aircraft operations leaner, in particular reducing costly fuel burn. Safety Line has successfully applied predictive analytics to deliver significant improvements to aircraft operations, strongly complementing SITA’s existing portfolio. With this acquisition, SITA will accelerate the development of sustainable solutions that can be integrated with its existing suite of airline and airport solutions.   

Reducing aircraft CO2 emissions in-flight and at airports

The acquisition comes as a logical follow-up to the commercial partnership signed between the two companies in September 2020, focused on helping airlines reduce their CO2 emissions with OptiFlight, the only predictive in-flight fuel efficiency solution leveraging machine learning performance models for each aircraft to optimize all flight phases including climb-out, cruise and descent. OptiFlight is already fully integrated with existing applications in SITA’s Digital Day of Operations portfolio, and current joint customers include Air France, Transavia Airlines, Aerologic and Condor.

On the ground, Safety Line’s AirsideWatch will allow SITA to expand its airports offering to airside operations, using surface movement radar data to better understand, analyze and optimize the ground traffic of aircraft between gates and runways with an aim to reduce unnecessary emissions.

Using data to improve safety and risk management

With safety being a key pillar in aviation alongside efficiency, the acquisition also covers SafetyCube, a solution that enables aviation stakeholders to pro-actively manage their safety and compliance. Key customers include large airports such as Paris-CDG and Paris-Orly or OEMs such as Airbus Helicopters, as well as airlines and ATM providers, all of which also compose SITA’s main customer base. SITA will, therefore, be able to expand its offering to include safety-enhancing services to existing customers.

Co-Innovating with airline and airport customers

“We were impressed with the way Safety Line have been able to transform the research from their data science team into real-life applications thanks to innovation partnerships with strategic airline customers such as  Transavia or Air France or airports such as Group ADP. Through our existing partnership, we have already delivered real value to our customers and this acquisition fits perfectly with SITA’s approach of partnering and co-innovating with our customers to increase efficiency and reduce emissions. We are excited to welcome the Safety Line team to SITA.”

Sébastien Fabre, CEO of SITA FOR AIRCRAFT

“We are delighted to join the SITA family, which should accelerate the global growth of our innovative solutions, for the benefit of more efficient and greener aviation operations.”

Pierre Jouniaux, Founder & CEO of Safety Line

Azores Airlines completes a decisive step in the modernization of its flight operations by implementing NAVBLUE’s Flysmart+ solution. 

Flysmart+ is the leading market solution of Airbus aircraft performance computation. The solution aims at optimizing aircraft performance determination, as well as providing efficient flight operations documentation management and consultation including electronic Quick Reference Handbook (eQRH). Flysmart+ allows to get more accurate performance results with maximum optimization (less conservatism) for all flight phases. 

Azores Airlines will be the first mainline airline in Portugal to use the AIRBUS/NAVBLUE eQRH. The eQRH is the last application which joined the NAVBLUE EFB suite, it replaces the traditional paper procedures and checklists, presenting them digitally and interactively according to the phase of the flight. 

This transition from paper use to Electronic Flight Bag (EFB) is fully in line with the on-going EFB as Standard Operations Airbus project which aims at establishing fully digital operations for A320/A330 and A340 aircraft by November 2021. 

Royal Brunei Airlines (RB) signed a contract to use NAVBLUE’s N-Flight Planning (NFP). 

RB has been an existing NAVBLUE customer, needed a highly configurable flight planning system that could easily integrate with third-party systems to eliminate manual entry and prevent human error. N-Flight Planning will allow RB to meet their needs as it comes with a configurable time-trigger and events-trigger automation and alerting system. This will allow RB’s dispatchers and flight-planners to focus on the tasks with more added value while depending on the system to handle the rest. 

“With the introduction of N-Flight Planning, RB is confident that the flight and fuel planning for our flights will be at par with the best in the industry. It’s interface, functions and accuracy puts RB at an operational advantage which otherwise would not have been possible,” said RB Chief Pilot, Captain Chua Hong Tad. 

N-Flight Planning is set to open new capabilities within RB flight operations department including a true manage-by-exception capability. 

About Royal Brunei Airlines (RB) 

Royal Brunei currently operates a fleet of fourteen aircraft comprising of five Boeing 787-8 aircraft together with seven Airbus A320neo aircraft and two Airbus A320ceo Aircraft. This year RB celebrates it’s 46th year anniversary of establishment and first flights. 

In 2019, RB moved up twelve places to be at number 66 in the top 100 airlines in the world, and awarded the Skytrax 4 Star Airline Rating. In 2020, RB won the World’s Leading Cabin Crew and Asia’s Leading Cabin Crew by World Travel Awards. 

Air Malta, the national airline of the Maltese Islands, has signed a 5-year agreement with Evoke for the EFOS Leave Management Suite. Replacing the current manual paper-based system currently used by the airline for their holiday booking processes, EFOS Leave will streamline the leave bidding process for their Pilots and Cabin Crew through immediate and prioritised bidding windows. The system will provide deterministic validation of their staff leave rules, delivering a judicially fair and transparent process to support and boost staff morale within the emotive area of leave.

Air Malta, the national airline of the Maltese Islands, has signed a 5-year agreement with Evoke for the EFOS Leave Management Suite. Replacing the current manual paper-based system currently used by the airline for their vacation leave booking processes, EFOS Leave will streamline the leave bidding process for their Pilots and Cabin Crew through immediate and prioritised bidding windows. The system will provide deterministic validation of their staff leave rules, delivering a judicially fair and transparent process to support and boost staff morale.

EFOS Leave will encompass bespoke validation rules in line with Air Malta’s current procedures, applying these in a just and deterministic manner throughout the leave booking process. This project will also see Evoke and Air Malta collaborate to introduce an innovative new method of integration between EFOS and Air Malta’s internal rostering and crew HR systems, allowing for increased operating efficiencies for their flight operations team.

“The EFOS Leave Management Suite is always a great solution to implement, as airline staff react so positively to the fair, transparent and rapid response they see with their leave requests. We are delighted to welcome Air Malta on board, and very much look forward to continuing and growing our relationship with this exciting airline as the project continues.”

Evoke co-founder and CTO Dr Craig Howard

About Evoke

Evoke are a British software company founded in 2003 by Dr Craig Howard and Captain Mark Linney. Based in the UK, Evoke supply intelligent software systems exclusively for the aviation industry across 3 customer product suites; EFOS Training Management, EFOS Leave Management and EFOS Flight Management. The EFOS product suites are approved for use in several aviation jurisdictions through Evoke’s global clients, including CAA, EASA, IAA, CAAI, and GCAA.

About Air Malta

Air Malta is a point-to-point airline transporting mainly leisure-based customers to the Maltese Islands. The airline started operations on the 1st April 1974 to seven scheduled services across Europe with two wet-leased aircraft. The airline now operates a fleet of seven Airbus A320 aircraft (four of which are A320neo) to 20 scheduled destinations in Europe. Over the course of its history, it transported over 57 million passengers safely to and from Malta.

For more information on Air Malta please visit www.airmalta.com.

Contact

Laura Broxton – Sales & Marketing Manager

Laura.broxton@evoke-systems.aero

Tel: +44 (0)3456 521 240

In 2013, MRX Systems unveiled Blue MRO with the ambition to complete Blue EYE and offer a fully integrated platform that would allow CAMO and MRO to share a live environment where all data would be linked in a flawless manner. 

Designed for MRO management, this module enables you to digitalize maintenance process from issuing quotations, assigning jobs to technicians, reporting repairs and findings until compiling all related paperwork into one exhaustive and automatically generated full work report.

Generate quotations for your regular and adhoc customers or receive new requests automatically from Blue EYE. Customer validation can be made through the dedicated iPad app, transforming approved quotations into work orders automatically. Create invoices, claims and credit notes in minutes thanks to the automatic selection of quoted man hours and spare parts.

Manage your project scheduling and technicians rostering via a designated planner, quickly get a view of parts, tools and materials allocation to improve workflow and quality control.

Just like with Blue EYE, upload related files into the relevant project and automatically produce documented and referenced reports.

Blue MRO enables you to generate a Full Work Report automatically at the end of each project. The data entry control features guarantee that no mandatory signature, part certificate or related file is missed or incorrect at each stage of the maintenance and all these are included into the final report. In one click, the result is an exhaustive, organized and referenced full work report that will become a key selling feature.

Ever since, the Blue EYE Suite kept on delivering the group promise of a secure, comprehensive and connected software solution that improves the precision and productivity of its users from all across the board, earning the recognition of prestigious industry leaders such as Airbus for its value and reliability.