With over 45,000 flights and 2 million passengers flying each day, keeping the airline industry on schedule is a herculean task. From mechanics and maintenance crews to flight teams and agents, and the ever-unpredictable mother nature, any of these factors can create a cascading domino effect of delays and cancellations—causing stress for both passengers and airlines. That’s why advantages such as the enhanced connectivity of 5G are critical for airlines to track real-time issues and allow employees to quickly collaborate to keep flights on schedule.
In this episode of The Restless Ones, we sit with Vikram Baskaran, Vice President of IT Services at Alaska Airlines, who is spearheading this once regional airline towards becoming one of the technology pioneers of the industry. Vikram believes the key to his mission of providing safe, award-winning experiences to Alaska’s passengers is for his organization to act as a smart connector. With dozens of interdependent functions operating behind the scenes, Vikram has utilized 5G so Alaska employees can act as a “virtual flash mob,” working together as one. Beyond collaboration, multi-edge computing, VR, and increased automation capabilities are all on Vikram’s roadmap to greater efficiency in the skies.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
As an airline, we make money when the planes are
in the air, not on the ground. We want to
be able to get all these diverse group of folks
who are now coming together to try to do their
specific function, but also knowing that the plane has to
push back on time, so they come together for those
forty minutes. They work together, and they are on a
live chat and they can basically troubleshoot real time to
(00:27):
solve any problems they are on into and if they
need to engage anybody outside of that huddle, they have
the option of connecting back to our s o C,
which is our Systems Operations Control and getting additional help
as well. But we basically created this virtual flash mob
power through five G which has made a big impact
on essentially ensuring that we can turn our aircraft as
(00:47):
quickly around as possible and continuing to be one of
the most on time airlines in the country. Welcome to
the Restless Ones. I'm Jonathan Strickland. As you may know,
I've spent the last fIF teen years covering technology and
learning how it works, demystifying everything from massive parallel processing
to advanced robotics and everything in between. Yet it's the
(01:12):
conversations with some of the most forward thinking leaders, those
at the intersection of technology and business that fascinate me
the most. When it comes to complicated industries that have
to respond immediately to rapidly changing scenarios, it's hard to
top the airline business. Coordinating operations is a monumental task,
(01:33):
requiring cooperation and collaboration as well as the right suite
of technological tools. Vicrambaskern's job involves identifying areas where the
right technological solution can improve operations. Some of them are
passenger focused and some are more about back end operations,
but at the end of the day, they all have
(01:54):
a huge impact on the business as a whole and,
as it turns out, on your experience when it's time
to travel. I was eager to talk with Vicram about
the innovations Alaska Airlines is exploring that are going to
transform travel and make the process of going from place
to place a more seamless, less stressful endeavor all well
(02:14):
meeting efficiency goals. But first I wanted to learn more
about Vicram's background. Vicram, I, I want to welcome you
to the Restless Ones. Thank you so much for joining
our show. Yeah, Thank you, Jonathan for having me excited
to be here. I was hoping you could tell us
(02:34):
a bit about how you first got interested in engineering.
I have always loved to build things, whether it was
legos as a kid, or putting together paper planes or
one of those model aircraft. I love building things. So
as I was going through high school and trying to
figure out what I wanted to do, engineering and kept
(02:55):
popping back up as something which probably fits my areas
of interests. Uh. I started pretty early and stuck to
my passion. One of the things I love about engineers
in general is how they see the world as sets
of challenges and opportunities and start to come up with solutions.
And when I look through your accolades, I could tell
(03:19):
that's very much the sort of engineer I would be
talking to. Can you tell us a bit about how
you made the leap into the airline industry? Oh? Yeah, absolutely.
Airlines have always been something I've been interested in as
I started my career in engineering, because I've had friends
who worked in the industry, either flying planes or working
(03:42):
for airlines, and I've always heard about the unique set
of challenges and airline has I don't want to date myself.
But this was back in the nineties and things were expanding.
I mean, more people who were flying globally, more people
are flying in the United States, and that travel was
picking up quite a bit. The other aspect of an
(04:03):
airline industry which fascinated me was seeing new places. So
I love to travel and I have always enjoyed visiting
new cities and learning about new cultures and eating all
the cool foods, and so it kind of brought together
two passions of mine, which was travel and planes, and
the output of that was an airline kind of became
(04:23):
a natural fit for me. As you say, airlines do
present numerous challenges. They're one of the most complicated industries
that I have ever really looked into. When you consider
everything that has to happen in order for operations to
run smoothly. How would you describe your job to someone
(04:44):
who's a casual acquaintance, maybe you're at a get together
and it's not someone who's in the industry. How do
you describe to them what it is you do? So,
simply put, I would boil it down to maybe smart connectors,
I think would be a way would explain everything we
do from a technology perspective. The reason I use those
(05:04):
two words is we are basically in the function of
trying to connect our employees to each other to be
able to turn an aircraft around faster, get an aircraft
ready to fly out, ensuring that our pilots and our
flight attendants and customer service agents have the right information
to do their jobs. Connecting our employees to our guests
(05:24):
who actually are coming out to the airport or are
in the process of booking a trip, and bringing all
of these folks together, as well as our management and
our back office teams who actually support our customers and
our employees to essentially one platform to solve all of
these challenges and get our guests safely from point A
(05:45):
to point B while enabling our employees to deliver what
Alaska is known for, which is basically our award winning
customer service. So I see myself and my organization as
a smart connector who actually makes all of this happen.
This is great opportunity for us to talk more specifically
about Alaska Airlines. Can you talk about the kinds of
(06:07):
challenges and opportunities you see there? Yeah? Absolutely, But the
Alaska Airlines our primary goal is creating an airline people love,
and the key here is creating. I don't think we'll
ever be done, but we want to provide an airline
to our customers and our employees which can not only
get you safely from point A to point B, but
(06:29):
also deliver award winning guest experiences and a place where
employees can come into work and bring the whole selves
to work and be successful at what they do. So
a key part of doing all of this for us
starts with safety. So we've been known for being one
of the safest airlines not only in the United States
(06:50):
but worldwide. So everything starts from the basis of safety
to make sure that we're on a safe operation for
our employees and our guests. We then build on that
to say, how can we keep our employees happy and
providing them the right set of tools and capability to
deliver the best guest experience. And then on the customer
(07:10):
side of it, focus on providing them not only the
self service capabilities we've all started to use quite a
bit more over the last few years, but also connecting
them to employees who can help out in times when
they actually need some extra help. So it's a combination
of all of these things is what we try to
do every day well, and to get into some more
(07:30):
recent challenges that the entire industry has faced, can you
talk a bit about some of the things you had
to address during the COVID pandemic and some of the
solutions that you rolled out in order to meet very
rapidly changing situations before COVID. I thought I'd seen everything
(07:52):
because I joined United pre nine eleven, and then of
course there was nine eleven and bankruptcy, and and then
when COVID hit, it required us to essentially build a
brand new playbook of what we needed to do to
keep our employees and guests safe and also function as
a business, which at a specific point down to very
(08:12):
little revenue. As you can imagine, there were very few
people flying, and the airline industry is so critical for
the United States as a whole, but also specific communities
in the United States, like the state of Alaska, where
air travel is essentially the lifeblood of specific communities, and
we wanted to make sure that we could safely keep
flying between those destinations and providing the key service for
(08:36):
the customers who needed whether it was a pandemic or not.
So there were subsets of our organization, which we gave
them the ability to work remotely, So that was a
big part of what we did. We gave them the
ability to do this from home. For folks who came
into the office I had to fly and work at
our airports. We wanted to make sure that we were
giving them up to date information with respect of the pandemic,
(08:58):
with respect to safety, with respect to anything they need,
so that they could feel safe about coming to work
and actually flying to all of these different cities and
continuing to operate the lost airlines, even though at a
much smaller scale. I'm not certain that my audience appreciates
how complicated this is when you're talking about an airline,
because not only are you implementing these new tools in
(09:20):
order to ensure safety and continue productivity, but those tools
have to work in a way that integrates with existing
systems and doesn't break anything that's already working. For airlines
in particular, being able to develop tests and then deploy
these tools is something that has incredible sense of urgency
(09:44):
as well as an enormous impact if things don't go well.
So can you talk a bit about how you oversee
that sort of process so the specific model V follow
starts with who is the end user of a specific
process or technology, So it all starts They're starting with
the front line is essentially the first step we do.
We are a very agile technology group, so we are
(10:08):
big into trying to essentially synthesize the feedback we've gotten
from our teams and building our prototypes, building out scale
down versions of what we plan to implement, and trying
it out. So every two weeks we would deploy specific
set of changes, get input from our frontline teams and
see how it works. A lot of them hit the mark,
but then there are other things which just don't hit
(10:30):
the mark. But this agilely trader process lends itself to
one where we can learn quickly from our mistakes and
pivot very quickly to meet exactly what the specific business needs,
whether it's for an employee or a customer. I imagine
you feel that that communication is a true key component
to strategy if you want to get buy in across
(10:50):
the organization whenever you're developing any sort of solution. Absolutely.
In fact, I think that might be one of the
key elements of our secret sauce we need the input
from the front line to build a tool which actually
meets their needs but also solves the business problem in
a clean and efficient manner. And going in with that
open mind and having that open conversation and learning from
(11:13):
the front line teams has absolutely been a game changer
for how we build our tools because the people we
talked to then become champions, and they talked to their
counterparts who we didn't get a chance to talk to.
Given that we are employee company, my hat is figuratively
and literally off to you for being part of that
(11:34):
sort of collaborative process. So it sounds to me like
Alaska Airlines has a very productive and positive culture. How
big a part does it play when you're looking at
innovations and having it integrate with, say, legacy systems, How
do you ensure interoperability? That is definitely a tough one
(11:55):
because we are a ninety year old airline. We struggle
with that every day on trying to take maybe the
best of what we can take from the past, which
has actually helped us get here, while trying to build
something which is better and can support an airline which
is rapidly growing. There have been specific cases where we
have had to retire legacy processes because that just wouldn't
(12:18):
scale in this current environment. There are specific things we
did really well as a smaller airline, and we do
the best to carry those forward as we are growing
and recruiting more folks to join us and more new
customers who fly us every day. But it's definitely one
of the tougher ones we wrestled with every day. Conventional
(12:40):
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(13:03):
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mobile dot com. Well, let's get to some of those
exciting innovations. This is the sort of stuff that I
get up early and I start combing through announcements. So
(13:24):
can you talk a little bit about the types of
technologies that are being tested in the Alaska Airlines Tech Incubator.
So a big part of our innovation focuses on the
customer experience as well as employee experience. When we look
at New York tech, we want to make sure that
it fits not only our airline ecosystem, but actually can
(13:46):
help make something better. One of those is biometrics, So
we absolutely I think biometrics is going to speed up
the process for folks who show up at the airport
and can we get you from the lobby to your
get in maybe twenty Why do you have to take
out your credit card or driver's license other ways we
can eliminate all of that friction through the use of
(14:08):
biometric in very select areas to actually get you through
the airport as quickly as possible while delivering a great experience.
The other part of which we are really looking to
double down on is five G and leveraging five G
two connect our employees and our guests. Because we want
near real time information and to be able to move
(14:29):
a customer through a lobby to the gate as quickly
as possible. It's going to require the best possible connectivity
for not only our employees but our guests. And how
can we leverage five G to actually move us through
all of these rapid decisions. Well, Vickorum, you've said one
of the phrases that lights me up because you've talked
about five G. So we have opened up that. Can
(14:51):
we're going to dive in a little further. Can you
hypothetically walk me through what a five G implementation might
mean for a cust we're in the future if we're
talking about this incredible connectivity with very low latency. The
entire experience of getting to your destination starts the minute
you wake up and you get your bags ready to
(15:15):
maybe call for an uber. So the minute you take
out your phone and figure out is my flight on time?
How does traffic look to get from your house or
your hotel to the airport? And of course, the things
most of our customers head is how long is my
T s A line going to be? Because the last
thing you want to do is to get stuck in
a long T s A line after having gotten to
(15:37):
the airport early enough. And the thing we have found
out through all of our customer research is the highest
level of stress the customer experiences is before they go
through security. How can we quickly essentially have them drop
their bags off and get through to T S A
So the key there is leveraging five G two actually
give them close to real time information on pointing them
(15:59):
to the quickert backdrop, the shortest ts A line, and
getting them past security. Once they passed security, they know
it's a lot easier you stroll up to the gate,
maybe spend some time in the Alaska lounge, and then
get to the gate and board when you want to
board and post t s A. The other aspect where
connectivity plays a key role is we want to be
(16:21):
able to serve up specific experience. It's like you are
a frequent flyer and you typically land up picking up
a fruit and cheese platter at sea tack before you
get on a plane. Could we maybe give you an
offer to potentially send you to a line where you
can pick up something else to try, or offer you
something which is prepackaged at our lounge, or say, hey,
(16:41):
the lounge is pretty open today, would you like to
pop in and grab a drink? So leveraging connectivity to
share that information with our guests to help them navigate
their way through the airport pretty quickly is one. The
flip side to all of this is the employees knowing
that my lobby is going to get super busy because
the Uber line just went up with forty new cars,
(17:03):
and I'm seeing huge families who are off to the
Hawaii trip with four bags each. So giving the same
information to our employees to meet the customers, to seamlessly
get them through the lobby is the other aspect of
all of the connectivity which we have started to tap
into and leverage and see what we can unlock very quickly.
(17:24):
Vicram I love this description because I have traveled quite
a bit myself and anything that does smooth out that
process is more than welcome in my book. Having this
capability on the back end to inform the customer and
to keep them able to make these quick decisions or
or point them in the right direction. It's such a
(17:46):
huge relief as a passenger to have that kind of
information at your fingertips, something that's only possible because we're
now in this era where we can connect to a
fiber like connection, but it's wireless, and we have the
access point in our pocket with our smartphone. It's a
complete game changer. Do you see other ways where this
(18:08):
five G connectivity is going to be helping the operations side,
so less on the passenger side, but more on the
employee side perhaps when it comes to the actual aircraft
and what's involved in preparing the aircraft for each and
every flight, like turnaround of the aircraft for example. So
on the employee side, the one aspect which I did
(18:30):
not talk about was actually turning the aircraft, where five
G absolutely plays an important role. You imagine a situation
where you have an aircraft coming into a gate and
set of pilots and flight attendants who leave the aircraft
to move on to do something else. You have a
brand new crew showing up, so you now have a
couple of new folks who have never really worked together
(18:50):
in the past, showing up at a gate. You have
a customer service agent who is at the gate who's
either giving out seat assignments, getting the last of the
customer is ready to board. And then you have folks
below the plane who are in the process of loading
up your bags and cargo and everything else. And you
also have our technicians who might have to do some
(19:10):
last minute service checks on an aircraft. So you now
have created a flash mob of folks who have come
together to try to get this aircraft back on time
as quickly as possible, and as an airline, we make
money when the planes are in the air, not on
the ground. We want to be able to get all
these diverse group of folks who are now coming together
(19:31):
to try to do their specific function, but also knowing
that the plane has to push back on time because
each of their functions are very interdependent and in the
past they would actually have to rely on either picking
up a phone or radio or walking down the jet bridge.
Now all they do is they take out their iPad
(19:51):
or their iPhone use their five G connection. And what
we have done is we have created this virtual huddle
for everything the departure, so they come together for those
forty minutes, they work together and they are on a
life chat and they can basically troubleshoot real time to
solve any problems they run into. And if they need
to engage anybody outside of that huddle, they have the
(20:13):
option of connecting back to our s o C, which
is our systems Operations Control and getting additional help as well.
But we basically created this virtual flash mob power through
five G, which has made a big impact on essentially
ensuring that we can turn our aircraft as quickly around
as possible and continuing to be one of the most
on time airlines in the country. I know that the
(20:34):
on time departure metric is one of the most important
that we look at when we're looking at airlines, and
having that capability is phenomenal. I'm curious, are there any
systems in place where there are things that are an
automated notification, like when a plane is approaching the point
where it might need maintenance or de icing these sorts
(20:57):
of things, or is that still very largely a human
driven process where you know you're using technology in order
to communicate it and to address it. I was just
curious where we are in technology along those lines. That's
a great question. When we talk about a turn time,
we've broken down that entire forty minute, minute by minute
of everything which needs to happen, whether it's below the wing,
(21:20):
under the aircraft, stuff which needs to be fixed, or
all the different functions which need to be performed. Specific
events here actually have triggers which actually ensure that we
can meet our timeline. So if let's say you needed
a specific set of bags in thirty minutes before departure,
and let's say we missed that window, you know automatically
(21:40):
triggers and alert saying hey, we're running behind and this
is what's happening. Or our pilots are in the flight
deck performing their final safety checks and they're like, hey,
I've uncovered something I need fixed in the next twenty minutes,
so I can still make it on time. So it's
a combination of manual and automated, and in an ideal state,
as we leverage more five G and connectivity, we would
(22:00):
be in a place to automate a lot more, but
we are quite not there yet. I wanted to talk
about another technology, multi access edge computing, and I wanted
to hear a little bit more about that and sort
of the opportunities it opens up in Alaska airlines. So
I think a lot of this goes back to we
want decision making to be as close to real time
(22:22):
as possible, and I think the part where multi edge
computing actually gives us a big advantages we can actually
push it out to our edge devices and not always
having to rely going back to the cloud or a
data center to get specific pieces of information. This is
one where we're still in our early phases where we're
(22:42):
starting to build in more decision making with our airport tools.
When you have a technician trying to work on fixing
a specific aircraft defect or trying to replace apart, we
need information at the tip of their fingers through something
like augmented reality, where you've actually in running some tests
on and pushing that information out to the edge where
(23:03):
they can quickly make a decision and and move forward,
versus always having to rely on information going back to
the cloud or data centers. So it's definitely an area
where if you're doing a couple of proof of concepts
and we are very excited about the possibilities there. Well,
you've mentioned argumented reality. I was also curious if Alaska
Airlines has been using mixed reality it's such as like
(23:25):
virtual reality in the process of training pilots, for example.
Is that something that the company has looked into, Not
the pilots, but we've definitely looked at trying to leverage
virtual reality for training some of our customer service agents,
because this is a scenario where we have folks who
have either performed a similar customer service function, maybe in
(23:46):
retail or maybe in a different industry, but might not
exactly translate into a setting of a gate where you're
trying to board a flight. You have lots of customers
trying to get into an aircraft in a very short
period of time. Other things we can do to actually
simulate what a gate environment would look like through a
virtual reality where they actually before they essentially work their
(24:08):
first flight, they have the option of experiencing what it
looks like when you have a gate area packed with
people and maybe an aircraft running five minutes late, or
maybe there's a snowstorm in Seattle, and how does all
of this happen? And as a customer service agent who's
probably going to experience at the first time on the job,
you're trying to prep them better by giving them a
(24:30):
situation through virtual reality where we throw specific cases at
them to say this is what happens where you have
an overbooked flight and you're trying to get somebody on,
or you are now trying to announce that your flight
is going to be twenty minutes late because it needs
to be deized. So that's another area we've definitely looked
at so that we can enhance the experience and essentially
(24:51):
equip our frontline teams better when they actually do their jobs.
That's fascinating. You know, Vicram years ago I talked about
how Psycholo just we're using virtual reality in order to
do a type of immersion therapy for people who had
certain phobias and being able to introduce them into an
experience that was traumatic for them, but they would know
(25:13):
ultimately that they were safe, and yet their body would
still go through the physical reactions they would have if
they were put in that real situation. I think it's
a brilliant use of the technology. Yeah. Absolutely, And this
is the other one where we can engage a frontline
teams to get feedback on how we can make this better,
because we want that experience as they go through the
(25:34):
training to be as realistic as possible, and virtual reality
has actually been a good one for us to really
look at and and start to help our customer service
agents build up muscle and be able to deliver that experience.
So definitely an area of where we're looking to do
a lot more in wonderful well as we look ahead,
(25:54):
what plans or initiatives does Alaska have to impact or
improve the airline industry, especially as we look towards this
ambitious goal of becoming carbon neutral by twy so Alaska officially,
we have declared publicly that we do plan to be
completely carbon neutral by so the one thing we've started
(26:15):
to do quite a bit, and the first step in
our process was looking to see how can we efficiently
get from point A to point B by leveraging technology
to actually fly not just faster, but actually fly more
fuel efficiently, because in the past it was all about
how quickly can we go from point A to point
B and fuel wasn't really considered. We implemented this tool
(26:36):
called flyways a couple of years ago, and what it
does is it looks through a specific route, let's say
Seattle to JFK. And in the past it would look
for specific way points and an efficient route to get
to you there, but fuel was essentially a byproduct of
the type of plane you flew and all of that.
What flyways does is it actually does that real time,
so it actually looks through the entire route we fly
(27:00):
and optimizes from a fuel perspective to actually have the
lowest fuel burne possible. And it not only does it
before the plane takes off, it actually does it real
time as the aircraft flies through. So any time you
encounter weather, which is now going to cause a change.
It computes based on fuel efficiency to find the most
fuel optimal route. The other aspect of what we're doing
(27:23):
is looking to see all the specific areas where we
are essentially putting more carbon into the environment. Sustainable aviation
fuel is a big part of that. So it's a
very small part of our fuel supply right now, but
s A F as it's called, is predominantly in up
and on the West Coast, where we do have suppliers
who provide that is a completely carbon neutral fuel, so
(27:45):
this doesn't add any net new carbon into the environment,
and that is one where we've been partnering not only
with the federal government but also smaller suppliers who are
hopefully will be able to scale up their supply over
the next few years to essentially provide us hundred percent
of a fuel. It would make a big step in
us helping get to carbon neutral. So that's what we're
doing on the air. On the ground, we're looking at
(28:06):
the same thing of potentially swapping out our vehicles which
burn gas to electric as well as automating other processes
which we can to start to rely less and less
on fuel. We're also looking at all electric aircraft for
the smaller stage distances. So this is not the Seattle's
to JFK. This might be the Seattle to Portland or
Seattle to San Francisco. And there are specific startups who
(28:29):
are actively looking at electric aircraft and trying to partner
and understand how quickly that technology can be brought to
market and commercialize so we can actually either retrofit or
existing planes or swap out our fleet for something more
electric for especially the shorter stage links. Wow, that's phenomenal.
(28:49):
Before it was time to say goodbye, I had to
ask Vicram one more thing, what do you believe is
the most misunder stood technology? I think I'm going to
go with a more general answer. In the past, I've
had business partners are folks I get to work with
(29:12):
expecting technology to be the silver bullet. They think you
implement a technology and all your problems go away, and
I think it's a recipe for disaster. I think it
always starts with understanding the business problem, building a robust
process to solve for that particular problem, and then figuring
out how technology can either automated your entire process or
(29:35):
alive it your ability to get there and I've seen
it flipped on the side of Hey, I found this
school technology and I want implemented, and all my problems
are going to go away, and that has led to
nothing but failure on top of failure. So I do
think people who aren't as closer technology look at it
as technology is going to solve all my problems and
it's not. It's a good answer, Vicrium, thank you so
(29:59):
much joining us on the show today. It has been
a real pleasure. Yeah, thank you Jonathan for having me.
It was great chatting with you. I feel like the
airline industry is one where it's really easy to see
when solutions are working. We experience it ourselves as we
(30:20):
navigate airports, find our way to our gate, board a flight,
and try to track down our luggage. I'm sure we
all have experiences that were hectic and stressful. I feel
like the solutions Victram was talking about using a combination
of employee interactions with passengers and automated systems transmitted through
five G connectivity, those are all ones that are going
(30:42):
to have a noticeable impact on how we experienced travel.
There's a huge ripple effect to passengers will have a
more pleasant experience when they travel. That will build customer loyalty,
Alaska Airline staff will be able to meet customer needs
more efficiently, and operations that weren't really possible before or
five G rollout will help reduce choke points. And the
(31:04):
thought of a future in which electric aircraft may be
used for short flights is a really intriguing one. I
definitely hope that works out. On a personal note, I've
already seen the benefits of incorporating wireless technology with the
airport experience. Being able to keep track of a flight status,
including whether it's at the gate that's printed on your
boarding pass or maybe somewhere else, that's enormously helpful. I
(31:27):
can't wait to see the next steps in that evolutionary path,
and five G is really what makes that possible. With
its low latency and high throughput. I can only imagine
the kind of passenger experience I will have in just
a couple of years. Thanks again to vicram Buskerun for
joining our show. Make sure you check back for our
(31:50):
future episodes, in which I'll speak with more tech leaders
to find out how they approach leadership and leverage technology
to meet company goals. I'll see you then, t Mobile
for Business knows companies want more than a one size
fits all approach to support. I want the world, so
(32:12):
we provide three sixty support customized to your business. From
discovery through post deployment. You'll get a dedicated account team
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As an airline, we make money when the planes are
in the air, not on the ground. We want to
be able to get all these diverse group of folks
who are now coming together to try to do their
specific function, but also knowing that the plane has to
push back on time, so they come together for those
forty minutes. They work together, and they are on a
live chat and they can basically troubleshoot real time to
(00:27):
solve any problems they are on into and if they
need to engage anybody outside of that huddle, they have
the option of connecting back to our s o C,
which is our Systems Operations Control and getting additional help
as well. But we basically created this virtual flash mob
power through five G which has made a big impact
on essentially ensuring that we can turn our aircraft as
(00:47):
quickly around as possible and continuing to be one of
the most on time airlines in the country. Welcome to
the Restless Ones. I'm Jonathan Strickland. As you may know,
I've spent the last fIF teen years covering technology and
learning how it works, demystifying everything from massive parallel processing
to advanced robotics and everything in between. Yet it's the
(01:12):
conversations with some of the most forward thinking leaders, those
at the intersection of technology and business that fascinate me
the most. When it comes to complicated industries that have
to respond immediately to rapidly changing scenarios, it's hard to
top the airline business. Coordinating operations is a monumental task,
(01:33):
requiring cooperation and collaboration as well as the right suite
of technological tools. Vicrambaskern's job involves identifying areas where the
right technological solution can improve operations. Some of them are
passenger focused and some are more about back end operations,
but at the end of the day, they all have
(01:54):
a huge impact on the business as a whole and,
as it turns out, on your experience when it's time
to travel. I was eager to talk with Vicram about
the innovations Alaska Airlines is exploring that are going to
transform travel and make the process of going from place
to place a more seamless, less stressful endeavor all well
(02:14):
meeting efficiency goals. But first I wanted to learn more
about Vicram's background. Vicram, I, I want to welcome you
to the Restless Ones. Thank you so much for joining
our show. Yeah, Thank you, Jonathan for having me excited
to be here. I was hoping you could tell us
(02:34):
a bit about how you first got interested in engineering.
I have always loved to build things, whether it was
legos as a kid, or putting together paper planes or
one of those model aircraft. I love building things. So
as I was going through high school and trying to
figure out what I wanted to do, engineering and kept
(02:55):
popping back up as something which probably fits my areas
of interests. Uh. I started pretty early and stuck to
my passion. One of the things I love about engineers
in general is how they see the world as sets
of challenges and opportunities and start to come up with solutions.
And when I look through your accolades, I could tell
(03:19):
that's very much the sort of engineer I would be
talking to. Can you tell us a bit about how
you made the leap into the airline industry? Oh? Yeah, absolutely.
Airlines have always been something I've been interested in as
I started my career in engineering, because I've had friends
who worked in the industry, either flying planes or working
(03:42):
for airlines, and I've always heard about the unique set
of challenges and airline has I don't want to date myself.
But this was back in the nineties and things were expanding.
I mean, more people who were flying globally, more people
are flying in the United States, and that travel was
picking up quite a bit. The other aspect of an
(04:03):
airline industry which fascinated me was seeing new places. So
I love to travel and I have always enjoyed visiting
new cities and learning about new cultures and eating all
the cool foods, and so it kind of brought together
two passions of mine, which was travel and planes, and
the output of that was an airline kind of became
(04:23):
a natural fit for me. As you say, airlines do
present numerous challenges. They're one of the most complicated industries
that I have ever really looked into. When you consider
everything that has to happen in order for operations to
run smoothly. How would you describe your job to someone
(04:44):
who's a casual acquaintance, maybe you're at a get together
and it's not someone who's in the industry. How do
you describe to them what it is you do? So,
simply put, I would boil it down to maybe smart connectors,
I think would be a way would explain everything we
do from a technology perspective. The reason I use those
(05:04):
two words is we are basically in the function of
trying to connect our employees to each other to be
able to turn an aircraft around faster, get an aircraft
ready to fly out, ensuring that our pilots and our
flight attendants and customer service agents have the right information
to do their jobs. Connecting our employees to our guests
(05:24):
who actually are coming out to the airport or are
in the process of booking a trip, and bringing all
of these folks together, as well as our management and
our back office teams who actually support our customers and
our employees to essentially one platform to solve all of
these challenges and get our guests safely from point A
(05:45):
to point B while enabling our employees to deliver what
Alaska is known for, which is basically our award winning
customer service. So I see myself and my organization as
a smart connector who actually makes all of this happen.
This is great opportunity for us to talk more specifically
about Alaska Airlines. Can you talk about the kinds of
(06:07):
challenges and opportunities you see there? Yeah? Absolutely, But the
Alaska Airlines our primary goal is creating an airline people love,
and the key here is creating. I don't think we'll
ever be done, but we want to provide an airline
to our customers and our employees which can not only
get you safely from point A to point B, but
(06:29):
also deliver award winning guest experiences and a place where
employees can come into work and bring the whole selves
to work and be successful at what they do. So
a key part of doing all of this for us
starts with safety. So we've been known for being one
of the safest airlines not only in the United States
(06:50):
but worldwide. So everything starts from the basis of safety
to make sure that we're on a safe operation for
our employees and our guests. We then build on that
to say, how can we keep our employees happy and
providing them the right set of tools and capability to
deliver the best guest experience. And then on the customer
(07:10):
side of it, focus on providing them not only the
self service capabilities we've all started to use quite a
bit more over the last few years, but also connecting
them to employees who can help out in times when
they actually need some extra help. So it's a combination
of all of these things is what we try to
do every day well, and to get into some more
(07:30):
recent challenges that the entire industry has faced, can you
talk a bit about some of the things you had
to address during the COVID pandemic and some of the
solutions that you rolled out in order to meet very
rapidly changing situations before COVID. I thought I'd seen everything
(07:52):
because I joined United pre nine eleven, and then of
course there was nine eleven and bankruptcy, and and then
when COVID hit, it required us to essentially build a
brand new playbook of what we needed to do to
keep our employees and guests safe and also function as
a business, which at a specific point down to very
(08:12):
little revenue. As you can imagine, there were very few
people flying, and the airline industry is so critical for
the United States as a whole, but also specific communities
in the United States, like the state of Alaska, where
air travel is essentially the lifeblood of specific communities, and
we wanted to make sure that we could safely keep
flying between those destinations and providing the key service for
(08:36):
the customers who needed whether it was a pandemic or not.
So there were subsets of our organization, which we gave
them the ability to work remotely, So that was a
big part of what we did. We gave them the
ability to do this from home. For folks who came
into the office I had to fly and work at
our airports. We wanted to make sure that we were
giving them up to date information with respect of the pandemic,
(08:58):
with respect to safety, with respect to anything they need,
so that they could feel safe about coming to work
and actually flying to all of these different cities and
continuing to operate the lost airlines, even though at a
much smaller scale. I'm not certain that my audience appreciates
how complicated this is when you're talking about an airline,
because not only are you implementing these new tools in
(09:20):
order to ensure safety and continue productivity, but those tools
have to work in a way that integrates with existing
systems and doesn't break anything that's already working. For airlines
in particular, being able to develop tests and then deploy
these tools is something that has incredible sense of urgency
(09:44):
as well as an enormous impact if things don't go well.
So can you talk a bit about how you oversee
that sort of process so the specific model V follow
starts with who is the end user of a specific
process or technology, So it all starts They're starting with
the front line is essentially the first step we do.
We are a very agile technology group, so we are
(10:08):
big into trying to essentially synthesize the feedback we've gotten
from our teams and building our prototypes, building out scale
down versions of what we plan to implement, and trying
it out. So every two weeks we would deploy specific
set of changes, get input from our frontline teams and
see how it works. A lot of them hit the mark,
but then there are other things which just don't hit
(10:30):
the mark. But this agilely trader process lends itself to
one where we can learn quickly from our mistakes and
pivot very quickly to meet exactly what the specific business needs,
whether it's for an employee or a customer. I imagine
you feel that that communication is a true key component
to strategy if you want to get buy in across
(10:50):
the organization whenever you're developing any sort of solution. Absolutely.
In fact, I think that might be one of the
key elements of our secret sauce we need the input
from the front line to build a tool which actually
meets their needs but also solves the business problem in
a clean and efficient manner. And going in with that
open mind and having that open conversation and learning from
(11:13):
the front line teams has absolutely been a game changer
for how we build our tools because the people we
talked to then become champions, and they talked to their
counterparts who we didn't get a chance to talk to.
Given that we are employee company, my hat is figuratively
and literally off to you for being part of that
(11:34):
sort of collaborative process. So it sounds to me like
Alaska Airlines has a very productive and positive culture. How
big a part does it play when you're looking at
innovations and having it integrate with, say, legacy systems, How
do you ensure interoperability? That is definitely a tough one
(11:55):
because we are a ninety year old airline. We struggle
with that every day on trying to take maybe the
best of what we can take from the past, which
has actually helped us get here, while trying to build
something which is better and can support an airline which
is rapidly growing. There have been specific cases where we
have had to retire legacy processes because that just wouldn't
(12:18):
scale in this current environment. There are specific things we
did really well as a smaller airline, and we do
the best to carry those forward as we are growing
and recruiting more folks to join us and more new
customers who fly us every day. But it's definitely one
of the tougher ones we wrestled with every day. Conventional
(12:40):
thinking says you have to pay more to get more.
I want the world, But Team Obile for Business uses
unconventional thinking to deliver premium benefits for better r o I.
From customized five G solutions to three sixty support, we
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it now. Innovating to improve business today and tomorrow. That
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(13:03):
covers not available in some areas, some require certain planter features,
mobile dot com. Well, let's get to some of those
exciting innovations. This is the sort of stuff that I
get up early and I start combing through announcements. So
(13:24):
can you talk a little bit about the types of
technologies that are being tested in the Alaska Airlines Tech Incubator.
So a big part of our innovation focuses on the
customer experience as well as employee experience. When we look
at New York tech, we want to make sure that
it fits not only our airline ecosystem, but actually can
(13:46):
help make something better. One of those is biometrics, So
we absolutely I think biometrics is going to speed up
the process for folks who show up at the airport
and can we get you from the lobby to your
get in maybe twenty Why do you have to take
out your credit card or driver's license other ways we
can eliminate all of that friction through the use of
(14:08):
biometric in very select areas to actually get you through
the airport as quickly as possible while delivering a great experience.
The other part of which we are really looking to
double down on is five G and leveraging five G
two connect our employees and our guests. Because we want
near real time information and to be able to move
(14:29):
a customer through a lobby to the gate as quickly
as possible. It's going to require the best possible connectivity
for not only our employees but our guests. And how
can we leverage five G to actually move us through
all of these rapid decisions. Well, Vickorum, you've said one
of the phrases that lights me up because you've talked
about five G. So we have opened up that. Can
(14:51):
we're going to dive in a little further. Can you
hypothetically walk me through what a five G implementation might
mean for a cust we're in the future if we're
talking about this incredible connectivity with very low latency. The
entire experience of getting to your destination starts the minute
you wake up and you get your bags ready to
(15:15):
maybe call for an uber. So the minute you take
out your phone and figure out is my flight on time?
How does traffic look to get from your house or
your hotel to the airport? And of course, the things
most of our customers head is how long is my
T s A line going to be? Because the last
thing you want to do is to get stuck in
a long T s A line after having gotten to
(15:37):
the airport early enough. And the thing we have found
out through all of our customer research is the highest
level of stress the customer experiences is before they go
through security. How can we quickly essentially have them drop
their bags off and get through to T S A
So the key there is leveraging five G two actually
give them close to real time information on pointing them
(15:59):
to the quickert backdrop, the shortest ts A line, and
getting them past security. Once they passed security, they know
it's a lot easier you stroll up to the gate,
maybe spend some time in the Alaska lounge, and then
get to the gate and board when you want to
board and post t s A. The other aspect where
connectivity plays a key role is we want to be
(16:21):
able to serve up specific experience. It's like you are
a frequent flyer and you typically land up picking up
a fruit and cheese platter at sea tack before you
get on a plane. Could we maybe give you an
offer to potentially send you to a line where you
can pick up something else to try, or offer you
something which is prepackaged at our lounge, or say, hey,
(16:41):
the lounge is pretty open today, would you like to
pop in and grab a drink? So leveraging connectivity to
share that information with our guests to help them navigate
their way through the airport pretty quickly is one. The
flip side to all of this is the employees knowing
that my lobby is going to get super busy because
the Uber line just went up with forty new cars,
(17:03):
and I'm seeing huge families who are off to the
Hawaii trip with four bags each. So giving the same
information to our employees to meet the customers, to seamlessly
get them through the lobby is the other aspect of
all of the connectivity which we have started to tap
into and leverage and see what we can unlock very quickly.
(17:24):
Vicram I love this description because I have traveled quite
a bit myself and anything that does smooth out that
process is more than welcome in my book. Having this
capability on the back end to inform the customer and
to keep them able to make these quick decisions or
or point them in the right direction. It's such a
(17:46):
huge relief as a passenger to have that kind of
information at your fingertips, something that's only possible because we're
now in this era where we can connect to a
fiber like connection, but it's wireless, and we have the
access point in our pocket with our smartphone. It's a
complete game changer. Do you see other ways where this
(18:08):
five G connectivity is going to be helping the operations side,
so less on the passenger side, but more on the
employee side perhaps when it comes to the actual aircraft
and what's involved in preparing the aircraft for each and
every flight, like turnaround of the aircraft for example. So
on the employee side, the one aspect which I did
(18:30):
not talk about was actually turning the aircraft, where five
G absolutely plays an important role. You imagine a situation
where you have an aircraft coming into a gate and
set of pilots and flight attendants who leave the aircraft
to move on to do something else. You have a
brand new crew showing up, so you now have a
couple of new folks who have never really worked together
(18:50):
in the past, showing up at a gate. You have
a customer service agent who is at the gate who's
either giving out seat assignments, getting the last of the
customer is ready to board. And then you have folks
below the plane who are in the process of loading
up your bags and cargo and everything else. And you
also have our technicians who might have to do some
(19:10):
last minute service checks on an aircraft. So you now
have created a flash mob of folks who have come
together to try to get this aircraft back on time
as quickly as possible, and as an airline, we make
money when the planes are in the air, not on
the ground. We want to be able to get all
these diverse group of folks who are now coming together
(19:31):
to try to do their specific function, but also knowing
that the plane has to push back on time because
each of their functions are very interdependent and in the
past they would actually have to rely on either picking
up a phone or radio or walking down the jet bridge.
Now all they do is they take out their iPad
(19:51):
or their iPhone use their five G connection. And what
we have done is we have created this virtual huddle
for everything the departure, so they come together for those
forty minutes, they work together and they are on a
life chat and they can basically troubleshoot real time to
solve any problems they run into. And if they need
to engage anybody outside of that huddle, they have the
(20:13):
option of connecting back to our s o C, which
is our systems Operations Control and getting additional help as well.
But we basically created this virtual flash mob power through
five G, which has made a big impact on essentially
ensuring that we can turn our aircraft as quickly around
as possible and continuing to be one of the most
on time airlines in the country. I know that the
(20:34):
on time departure metric is one of the most important
that we look at when we're looking at airlines, and
having that capability is phenomenal. I'm curious, are there any
systems in place where there are things that are an
automated notification, like when a plane is approaching the point
where it might need maintenance or de icing these sorts
(20:57):
of things, or is that still very largely a human
driven process where you know you're using technology in order
to communicate it and to address it. I was just
curious where we are in technology along those lines. That's
a great question. When we talk about a turn time,
we've broken down that entire forty minute, minute by minute
of everything which needs to happen, whether it's below the wing,
(21:20):
under the aircraft, stuff which needs to be fixed, or
all the different functions which need to be performed. Specific
events here actually have triggers which actually ensure that we
can meet our timeline. So if let's say you needed
a specific set of bags in thirty minutes before departure,
and let's say we missed that window, you know automatically
(21:40):
triggers and alert saying hey, we're running behind and this
is what's happening. Or our pilots are in the flight
deck performing their final safety checks and they're like, hey,
I've uncovered something I need fixed in the next twenty minutes,
so I can still make it on time. So it's
a combination of manual and automated, and in an ideal state,
as we leverage more five G and connectivity, we would
(22:00):
be in a place to automate a lot more, but
we are quite not there yet. I wanted to talk
about another technology, multi access edge computing, and I wanted
to hear a little bit more about that and sort
of the opportunities it opens up in Alaska airlines. So
I think a lot of this goes back to we
want decision making to be as close to real time
(22:22):
as possible, and I think the part where multi edge
computing actually gives us a big advantages we can actually
push it out to our edge devices and not always
having to rely going back to the cloud or a
data center to get specific pieces of information. This is
one where we're still in our early phases where we're
(22:42):
starting to build in more decision making with our airport tools.
When you have a technician trying to work on fixing
a specific aircraft defect or trying to replace apart, we
need information at the tip of their fingers through something
like augmented reality, where you've actually in running some tests
on and pushing that information out to the edge where
(23:03):
they can quickly make a decision and and move forward,
versus always having to rely on information going back to
the cloud or data centers. So it's definitely an area
where if you're doing a couple of proof of concepts
and we are very excited about the possibilities there. Well,
you've mentioned argumented reality. I was also curious if Alaska
Airlines has been using mixed reality it's such as like
(23:25):
virtual reality in the process of training pilots, for example.
Is that something that the company has looked into, Not
the pilots, but we've definitely looked at trying to leverage
virtual reality for training some of our customer service agents,
because this is a scenario where we have folks who
have either performed a similar customer service function, maybe in
(23:46):
retail or maybe in a different industry, but might not
exactly translate into a setting of a gate where you're
trying to board a flight. You have lots of customers
trying to get into an aircraft in a very short
period of time. Other things we can do to actually
simulate what a gate environment would look like through a
virtual reality where they actually before they essentially work their
(24:08):
first flight, they have the option of experiencing what it
looks like when you have a gate area packed with
people and maybe an aircraft running five minutes late, or
maybe there's a snowstorm in Seattle, and how does all
of this happen? And as a customer service agent who's
probably going to experience at the first time on the job,
you're trying to prep them better by giving them a
(24:30):
situation through virtual reality where we throw specific cases at
them to say this is what happens where you have
an overbooked flight and you're trying to get somebody on,
or you are now trying to announce that your flight
is going to be twenty minutes late because it needs
to be deized. So that's another area we've definitely looked
at so that we can enhance the experience and essentially
(24:51):
equip our frontline teams better when they actually do their jobs.
That's fascinating. You know, Vicram years ago I talked about
how Psycholo just we're using virtual reality in order to
do a type of immersion therapy for people who had
certain phobias and being able to introduce them into an
experience that was traumatic for them, but they would know
(25:13):
ultimately that they were safe, and yet their body would
still go through the physical reactions they would have if
they were put in that real situation. I think it's
a brilliant use of the technology. Yeah. Absolutely, And this
is the other one where we can engage a frontline
teams to get feedback on how we can make this better,
because we want that experience as they go through the
(25:34):
training to be as realistic as possible, and virtual reality
has actually been a good one for us to really
look at and and start to help our customer service
agents build up muscle and be able to deliver that experience.
So definitely an area of where we're looking to do
a lot more in wonderful well as we look ahead,
(25:54):
what plans or initiatives does Alaska have to impact or
improve the airline industry, especially as we look towards this
ambitious goal of becoming carbon neutral by twy so Alaska officially,
we have declared publicly that we do plan to be
completely carbon neutral by so the one thing we've started
(26:15):
to do quite a bit, and the first step in
our process was looking to see how can we efficiently
get from point A to point B by leveraging technology
to actually fly not just faster, but actually fly more
fuel efficiently, because in the past it was all about
how quickly can we go from point A to point
B and fuel wasn't really considered. We implemented this tool
(26:36):
called flyways a couple of years ago, and what it
does is it looks through a specific route, let's say
Seattle to JFK. And in the past it would look
for specific way points and an efficient route to get
to you there, but fuel was essentially a byproduct of
the type of plane you flew and all of that.
What flyways does is it actually does that real time,
so it actually looks through the entire route we fly
(27:00):
and optimizes from a fuel perspective to actually have the
lowest fuel burne possible. And it not only does it
before the plane takes off, it actually does it real
time as the aircraft flies through. So any time you
encounter weather, which is now going to cause a change.
It computes based on fuel efficiency to find the most
fuel optimal route. The other aspect of what we're doing
(27:23):
is looking to see all the specific areas where we
are essentially putting more carbon into the environment. Sustainable aviation
fuel is a big part of that. So it's a
very small part of our fuel supply right now, but
s A F as it's called, is predominantly in up
and on the West Coast, where we do have suppliers
who provide that is a completely carbon neutral fuel, so
(27:45):
this doesn't add any net new carbon into the environment,
and that is one where we've been partnering not only
with the federal government but also smaller suppliers who are
hopefully will be able to scale up their supply over
the next few years to essentially provide us hundred percent
of a fuel. It would make a big step in
us helping get to carbon neutral. So that's what we're
doing on the air. On the ground, we're looking at
(28:06):
the same thing of potentially swapping out our vehicles which
burn gas to electric as well as automating other processes
which we can to start to rely less and less
on fuel. We're also looking at all electric aircraft for
the smaller stage distances. So this is not the Seattle's
to JFK. This might be the Seattle to Portland or
Seattle to San Francisco. And there are specific startups who
(28:29):
are actively looking at electric aircraft and trying to partner
and understand how quickly that technology can be brought to
market and commercialize so we can actually either retrofit or
existing planes or swap out our fleet for something more
electric for especially the shorter stage links. Wow, that's phenomenal.
(28:49):
Before it was time to say goodbye, I had to
ask Vicram one more thing, what do you believe is
the most misunder stood technology? I think I'm going to
go with a more general answer. In the past, I've
had business partners are folks I get to work with
(29:12):
expecting technology to be the silver bullet. They think you
implement a technology and all your problems go away, and
I think it's a recipe for disaster. I think it
always starts with understanding the business problem, building a robust
process to solve for that particular problem, and then figuring
out how technology can either automated your entire process or
(29:35):
alive it your ability to get there and I've seen
it flipped on the side of Hey, I found this
school technology and I want implemented, and all my problems
are going to go away, and that has led to
nothing but failure on top of failure. So I do
think people who aren't as closer technology look at it
as technology is going to solve all my problems and
it's not. It's a good answer, Vicrium, thank you so
(29:59):
much joining us on the show today. It has been
a real pleasure. Yeah, thank you Jonathan for having me.
It was great chatting with you. I feel like the
airline industry is one where it's really easy to see
when solutions are working. We experience it ourselves as we
(30:20):
navigate airports, find our way to our gate, board a flight,
and try to track down our luggage. I'm sure we
all have experiences that were hectic and stressful. I feel
like the solutions Victram was talking about using a combination
of employee interactions with passengers and automated systems transmitted through
five G connectivity, those are all ones that are going
(30:42):
to have a noticeable impact on how we experienced travel.
There's a huge ripple effect to passengers will have a
more pleasant experience when they travel. That will build customer loyalty,
Alaska Airline staff will be able to meet customer needs
more efficiently, and operations that weren't really possible before or
five G rollout will help reduce choke points. And the
(31:04):
thought of a future in which electric aircraft may be
used for short flights is a really intriguing one. I
definitely hope that works out. On a personal note, I've
already seen the benefits of incorporating wireless technology with the
airport experience. Being able to keep track of a flight status,
including whether it's at the gate that's printed on your
boarding pass or maybe somewhere else, that's enormously helpful. I
(31:27):
can't wait to see the next steps in that evolutionary path,
and five G is really what makes that possible. With
its low latency and high throughput. I can only imagine
the kind of passenger experience I will have in just
a couple of years. Thanks again to vicram Buskerun for
joining our show. Make sure you check back for our
(31:50):
future episodes, in which I'll speak with more tech leaders
to find out how they approach leadership and leverage technology
to meet company goals. I'll see you then, t Mobile
for Business knows companies want more than a one size
fits all approach to support. I want the world, so
(32:12):
we provide three sixty support customized to your business. From
discovery through post deployment. You'll get a dedicated account team
and expertise from solutions engineers and industry advisors already right now,
I want it now. Three sixty support that's customized for
your success. That's unconventional thinking from T Mobile for Business.
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