Imagine boarding a flight without removing your shoes, fumbling with your passport, or worrying about your liquids and electronics. Your digital ID, boarding pass, and bag tags are securely stored in your smart device before you leave home. On arrival, you simply stroll down a tunnel, where cameras and scanners verify that you and your bags are safe to fly. Out-of-sight software leverages vast troves of real-time data to whisk you, your luggage, and your aircraft to your destination as quickly as possible.
The digital airport isn’t some futuristic fantasy; it already exists. Elements of all these technologies are rapidly being tested and rolled out at airports around the world: biometric verification, smart-phone-based digital IDs, bag trackers, big data to track flights, passengers, and cargo, as well as robots and artificial intelligence. You almost certainly have encountered them if you’ve flown recently to or through the United States, where biometric screening, check-in, and gate boarding are becoming more routine.
But in Canada, most of these technologies are still in the early stages of implementation. We’re falling behind pace and will continue to do so unless airports, airlines, federal agencies, and government legislators make intentional decisions, together and on their own, to close the digital gaps.
At Toronto Pearson, where we are in the early stages of a decade-long capital program, Pearson LIFT, to modernize and expand. We see a generational opportunity to accelerate digital experience by design. Digitalization has many prongs, but I see three immediate areas of action to be addressed in the name of speed, efficiency, and passenger experience.
The first is data, specifically how it gets secured, shared, or not shared. Data is the lifeblood of digital innovation, but there are still significant shortfalls in how the Canadian aviation industry shares it. Passenger experience works best by designing a series of linked events—if nobody can see the entire chain, an undiagnosed bottleneck can ripple through an airport in minutes. Without the sharing of operational data, passengers experience more delayed and cancelled flights, more frequent gate changes, more lost bags, and more long queues. Conversely, healthy data sharing can lead to tailored communications, friction-free passenger flow, and value-added service offerings that learn and align with your preferences.
There are as many ways to improve data sharing given the many partners in our ecosystem: airlines, airports, and government agencies such as the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority, the Canadian Border Services Agency, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection. At Pearson alone, there are 400 different employers and 52,000 workers. We need to work together and share information to keep things running smoothly.
One ongoing challenge for Canadian airports is the lack of forecasted and real-time flight information we have typically received from airlines. Airport planners frequently need to rely on informal patchworks of information to deduce critical data such as anonymized passenger profiles (e.g. how many are unaccompanied minors, how many require mobility assistance, how many are connecting to other destinations) and operational data that can improve airport efficiency (e.g. the number of passengers on a given flight, fuelling requirements, bag, and commercial parcels counts).
Data privacy is extraordinarily important. Passenger data needs to be anonymized and secured to safeguard confidentiality and instill confidence in these systems. But even aggregated data can pay enormous dividends. Imagine an incoming flight with a relatively high percentage of passengers requiring tight connections—armed with this data beforehand, an airport could shuffle gate assignments or move support staff to help these passengers get to their next gate as quickly as possible.
In the European Union countries, this type of data-sharing is required by law, but it is still being reviewed in Canada. The 2023 federal budget directed Transport Canada to develop mandated data-sharing protocols across Canada’s aviation ecosystem, and it’s a step in the right direction because it has enormous potential for improving performance for all.
A second area of focus is to harness the power of artificial intelligence, predicated on a healthy and strong ecosystem data-sharing practice. We need to handle data well to realize AI’s vast potential, from customer service to security to operational efficiency. Globally, some airports are using AI-powered robots to move bags, clean concourses, and give directions to passengers. Toronto Pearson recently installed sensors and smart software to monitor, analyze, and improve turnaround time at the gate. By analyzing how long it takes airlines to deboard and board passengers, pump fuel, and load baggage and catering, we can proactively mobilize operations to help improve their on-time performance.
Another way Pearson uses AI is in predictive maintenance, which can help baggage-handling systems perform at their best to avoid delays and congestion. Our software listens to the system’s many parts, triggering alerts and anticipating breakdowns before they happen, which allows us to schedule repair work during off hours to minimize disruption. In 2023, our AI-enhanced system routinely bested 99.5 percent uptime availability. Again, this is technology at its best—not replacing human labour, but helping workers work more efficiently to create better outcomes for passengers.
The third area of opportunity is to design airports to become digital hubs. While airports don’t fly the planes or make the legislation, they can act as digital architects and integrators of the multi-modal spaces where all these stakeholders come together.
For instance, Vancouver and Toronto Pearson are two Canadian airports using digital twins to integrate feeds from multiple partners across the airport in order to see, forecast, and make decisions in real-time and head off trouble before it happens.
Pearson is working toward a vision of Total Airport Management, which combines and unifies multiple datasets into a super twin to visualize, track, and simulate people movement, baggage handling, ground vehicles, aircraft, and terminal activity. But we still have a long way to go. We are developing our LIFT digital master plan, which lays out our digitalization agenda for the next decade. It envisions several step-changes that require leadership across a network of airport partners that will eventually enable full biometric authentication, on-the-move security, and immigration processing using unified tech stacks with key partners.
This process will teach us many lessons and give us much to share with airports across Canada. But we will also have much to learn from them in order to square the circle between data gaps and digital solutions. Canadian airports can all play leadership roles by bringing everyone to the table in the interest of speed, efficiency, and passenger service.
Digitalization is more than just sharing data or installing AI or managing partners. It’s about making strategic decisions that future-proof our investments and evolve to meet and exceed customer expectations. We should keep these goals front of mind, as we work together, to build the airport of the future.
This article was made possible by Toronto Pearson Airport and the generosity of readers like you. Donate today.
