Case Studies

Air France: Major Airline and Airport Overhauls Ground Operations

Airport ground operations, a broad area including all operational activities in an airport, are currently undergoing major changes, some of which led to CSC helping Air France transform its main platform, the hub at the Roissy-Charles de Gaulle airport, located just outside of Paris. The project was one of six honored in 2003 by CSC's Leading Edge Forum, which awarded it the prestigious Award for Technical Excellence.

The Hub Concept

The hub has become a key advantage for major airline companies. Since 1996, Air France has structured its activities and flight planning to make Roissy-Charles de Gaulle (CDG), its official hub, an efficient correspondence platform. This concept consists of creating rendezvous time slots between arriving and departing flights. For example, all arriving flights are concentrated on a dedicated time slot. This is followed by a time slot dedicated to departing flights. This sequence of arrival/departure time slots is repeated six times a day. Such a schedule multiplies correspondence opportunities with minimum waiting times between flights — typically 45 minutes to two hours. The hub concept dramatically increases the number of origins and destinations an airline can provide its customers. On a daily basis, Air France provides more than 2,000 correspondence opportunities at CDG (with less than two hours waiting time), yet technically there are only 400 flights per day.

The hub concept has contributed significantly to increased traffic at Air France and has thus become its foundation for strategic growth. However, this concept imposes large constraints in terms of ground operations: activity is concentrated during short periods of time, and time allowed for succeeding in transfers for both the passenger and luggage is very short. These operational constraints became even more prominent at CDG with increased traffic since the launch of the hub (an approximate increase of 20 percent each year since 1996).

The Challenge: Infrastructure

In addition, given the competition of other large European hubs (e.g., British Airways at Heathrow, U.K.; KLM at Schiphol, the Netherlands; Lufthansa at Frankfurt, Germany) the hub at CDG presented two major handicaps in terms of its infrastructure, which was originally designed for point-to-point traffic and not correspondence traffic. First, it had a significantly inferior contact percentage — the percentage of flights parked directly at the terminal. These flights do not require passenger transport by bus to the terminal, reducing baggage transfer time. The contact percentage has a strong and direct impact on flight punctuality and successful handling of bags in transfer. Second, it had a less efficient baggage handling system. The handling of bags at CDG — especially bags in transfer, which are the most difficult to handle — requires the use of numerous nonintegrated and complex infrastructure systems, such as sorters and handling zones that add to an already arduous task.

Planned Evolution

Significant evolution in the CDG infrastructures has been planned to allow Air France to compete with other airlines. The changes began with the opening of a new terminal (E) in June 2003. This will be followed by a new satellite in 2006 and another satellite later. These new infrastructures will allow Air France to refocus its operations on the east side of the platform with the other modern terminals, which will in turn facilitate efficient correspondences and improve considerably the contact percentage.

To obtain the most from these new infrastructures, Air France is rethinking its operational processes (passenger processing and baggage handling) to improve quality for their clients while improving the company’s economic performance.