Lloyd's Register Foundation

Lloyd's Register Foundation

May 2018: vianair awarded lrf research grant
VIANAIR; PIONEERING THE NEXT WAVE OF AVIATION INNOVATION

New York City, May 30th – Vianair Inc. has been awarded a research and development grant from the Lloyd’s Register Foundation for $261,000 to continue work on their proprietary airspace design and planning platform.

Even the smallest commercial airport is hugely complex, with everything from air traffic control to aprons, gates and hangars all interconnected and interdependent. In areas such as New York, where several large airports all need to work together to keep aircraft and people safe, the complexities multiply.

Stavros Sidiropoulos, who founded Vianair with support from the Foundation, says that the key issue is that the current processes and systems for planning the flow of aircraft arriving, departing and moving around airports simply don’t allow for the simultaneous consideration of multiple objectives. “The resulting inefficiencies lead to a negative impact on the lives of passengers and everybody else in society – more noise, more emissions, more delays, more cost and, crucially, greater risk to life.”

Vianair software provides a unified design platform to give airports a holistic view of the impact of planning decisions. For the first time, airports can now understand the trade-offs between design objectives – for example fuel burn and emissions versus noise – and make balanced, considered decisions that also result in safer operations.

“We’re currently working with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which manages one of the busiest airspaces in the world,” explains Stavros. “Early tests found that our software has the potential to result in tens of millions of dollars in annual savings, significantly reducing congestion, delays and environmental impact by between 10% and 20%. Look behind those stats and the benefits are very significant for communities around airports as well as for passengers – we believe this is a massive step forward towards a more sustainable aviation industry.”

 

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