Aircraft Turnaround Management Software for Airport Operations
Tizora is building aircraft turnaround management software as a focused proof of concept for airport operations teams. It joins flight schedules, gate and stand plans and SOPs into one live timeline per flight, flags turnaround delay risk early, shows gate and stand occupancy, and recommends aircraft parking decisions with the reasons and sources behind them.
What the turnaround management software gives an operations team
Why do aircraft turnarounds run late?
An aircraft turnaround is everything that happens between an aircraft arriving on stand and pushing back for its next flight: passengers off, baggage and cargo unloaded, cleaning, catering, fuelling, checks, boarding and loading. Many of these tasks run in parallel, are done by different companies and depend on each other. One late fuel truck or a missing set of steps can move the whole departure.
Most turnarounds do not run late because nobody is working. They run late because nobody sees the problem early enough. Information is spread across flight systems, turnaround plans, SOPs, emails, radio calls and operational teams, while delays and resource conflicts keep changing through the day. It is the same coordination problem we solved between a storefront and warehouse robots in our CStore Master project, only with aircraft, stands and departure slots.
Any decision also has to be explainable. A duty manager who moves an aircraft to a remote stand needs to know which airport rule allows it and what happens to the next arrival.
- No single live view of where each turnaround stands against its plan
- Delay risk noticed late, when the departure time is already lost
- Gate and stand conflicts found by phone and radio, not ahead of time
- SOPs and airport rules hard to find at the moment a decision is needed
- Existing flight and airport systems had to stay in place
How does the turnaround management system work?
Seven steps take the system from raw operational data to a decision a person can act on. The software does not move aircraft or change plans by itself. It tells the right team what is at risk, why, and what they can do about it.
Turnaround management system architecture
The design is layered so it adds intelligence without replacing the systems an airport already depends on. Operational sources feed an integration layer that keeps one record per flight. Three services work on that record: a turnaround tracker, a delay-risk engine and a stand occupancy view. Their output becomes recommendations, delivered through an operations dashboard, alerts and a knowledge assistant.
Two ideas carry over from our other work. The software wraps existing systems instead of replacing them, the same approach we took with the recognition engine in our AI license plate recognition project. And every recommendation is written to a decision history, much like the append-only audit log behind our core banking platform.
What does the aircraft turnaround software do?
Six capabilities, each built around a question operations teams ask many times a shift.
What technology powers the turnaround platform?
The proof-of-concept stack, layer by layer.
Data sources
What the airport already has, read through integrations.
- AODB integration
- Flight schedule data
- Gate and stand plan data
- SOP and airport rule documents
Losing minutes on the apron? See how a turnaround pilot could run on your existing flight and stand data.
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Turnaround management before and after the software
This is a proof of concept, so the table compares how the work is done, not measured performance. Turnaround time and on-time performance figures will be added once a pilot has been measured.
| Operational need | Without the software | to | With the software | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Turnaround status | Asked for by phone and radio | One live timeline per flight | Shared view | |
| Delay risk | Seen when the departure is already late | Flagged while there is time to recover | Earlier | |
| Gate and stand conflicts | Found as the next aircraft arrives | Shown ahead of the arrival | Earlier | |
| Aircraft parking decisions | Planner experience and manual checks | Suggested positions with reasons | Explainable | |
| Finding the right SOP | Search across folders and inboxes | Plain-language question, sourced answer | Faster | |
| Reviewing a decision | Rebuilt from logs and memory | Read from the decision history | Traceable |
About this comparison
- Stage:
- proof of concept, not yet a measured production deployment.
- Basis:
- the workflow the software is designed to change, as described on this page.
- Next:
- measured turnaround and on-time figures after pilot validation.
A late turnaround is rarely a surprise to everyone. Somebody on the apron saw it coming. Our job is to get that knowledge to the person who can still do something about it, and to show them why.
Lessons
What we learned designing it
Start with one flight record
Until inbound, outbound, stand and tasks sit in one record, every team argues from a different version of the day.
An alert without a reason gets ignored
Operations teams act on a warning when it shows what is late, what it affects and which rule applies.
Keep people in charge
The software recommends and records. Stand changes and recovery actions stay with the duty manager and planner.
Will this work for your airport or airline?
Who it fits, what it connects to and how a pilot starts.
- Built for
- airport operations control centres, duty managers, gate and stand planners, airline operations control and ground-handling supervisors
- Connects to
- your existing flight, gate and stand data, plus SOPs and airport rules, through an integration layer
- How it starts
- a focused proof of concept on a set of stands or one terminal, with human review of every recommendation, the same principle as the manual review step in our digital KYC platform
This approach fits airport and airline operations teams that already have flight and stand data but still chase turnaround status by phone and radio.
Aircraft turnaround FAQs
Frequently asked questions
Aircraft turnaround management is the planning, tracking and coordination of everything that happens between an aircraft arriving on stand and departing again. It covers deboarding, baggage and cargo handling, cleaning, catering, fuelling, checks and boarding, and the goal is to get the aircraft away safely and on time.
Aircraft turnaround time is the time an aircraft spends on the ground between arriving at its stand (on blocks) and pushing back for its next flight (off blocks). It depends on aircraft type, the airline's operating model and how well the ground tasks are coordinated.
Turnaround management software gives airports, airlines and ground handlers a live view of each turnaround against its plan. It tracks tasks and milestones, warns when a departure is at risk and helps teams coordinate. Tizora's software adds gate and stand occupancy and aircraft parking recommendations, each with its reasons and sources.
Common causes are a late inbound aircraft, ground tasks that start late or overrun, equipment or staff that are not at the stand in time, gate and stand conflicts, and slow communication between the teams involved. Many of these are visible before the departure is lost, which is why early delay risk alerts matter.
It compares each task and milestone with its planned time. When something starts late or runs long, the system works out the effect on the departure time and flags the flight as at risk, with the task that caused it. The responsible team then gets an alert while there is still time to recover.
Airport Collaborative Decision Making (A-CDM) is the EUROCONTROL concept in which airport partners share milestone data for each flight, including the Target Off-Block Time (TOBT). Turnaround management software supports that way of working by showing how the turnaround is really progressing, which helps teams keep a realistic TOBT.
No. The software reads from the flight, gate and stand systems an airport already runs, through an integration layer. It adds turnaround tracking, delay risk and recommendations on top; your existing systems stay the system of record.
Not yet. Tizora is developing it as a focused airport-operations proof of concept, so this page describes how the software works and what it changes in the workflow. Measured results will be published after a pilot.
Disclosure
This case study describes a proof of concept developed by Tizora. It contains no measured client results and no client is named. Tizora is not affiliated with EUROCONTROL, which is mentioned for industry context only.
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