<p>After more than a century of air travel across the world, airports have transformed radically from simple transitory stations to sophisticated commercial hubs, which are as complex to operate as small cities. Fast-moving technological developments in aerospace infrastructure, flight operations and managerial intelligence are serving to usher in a new era of airport functionality. Further, with the proliferation of more pervasive connectivity, access to more bandwidth at lower costs, reduced data storage maintenance as well information processing and comprehensive analytics - a new paradigm for aircraft and airport connectivity has been created.<br><br>Here in India, airports across the five major metros of Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Hyderabad and Chennai have experienced a rapid transformation and any recent traveller will testify to their international standards. The Airports Authority of India (AAI) has put in place a laudable goal of upgrading all of the country's airports within a span of 10 years to ensure better connectivity within the country as well as to international destinations. This is a crucial move as passenger numbers across the country are expected to reach 540 million annually by 2025 up from 169 million witnessed in 2013-14. However, operator margins have remained tight despite continued growth in passengers. Thus, lowering of operational costs has become one of the key challenges in the Indian aviation industry.<br><br>To cope with the country's growth, new airport systems need to be adopted to significantly streamline the growing air traffic. There has to be a closer synchronization between the facets of air traffic flow management, air traffic control, aircraft operators, ground handling and airport operations. In essence, creating an ecosystem of next generation, satellite-based technologies that provides flight crews, passengers as well as maintenance and operations personnel with real-time seamless access to information is pivotal. Further, airports must be able to know their future resource needs by traffic forecasting done by simulation softwares. In other words, India's airports of the future need to become smarter.<br><br>It would serve the authorities operating these various aviation hubs well to make note of some of the newer technologies that would assist them to address multiple situations being faced by operations staff and travellers. For instance, Near Field Communications (NFC) can make the experience of flying seamless by reducing processes and allowing direct contact with the passenger. For example, unmanned boarding will automatically admit travellers by reading the boarding pass stored on their phones. In addition, providing phone notifications in the event of travel disruptions and immigration procedures will ensure a more tranquil travel experience. Hence, airport operators should ideally look at investing further in solutions that further consolidate their current Wi-Fi networks and enhance their cloud infrastructure to allow for better movement of passengers through an airport terminal. <br><br>While the journey towards completing the defined target of upgraded aviation hubs within the next 10 years is a formidable one, the right steps are being taken to guarantee its completion. Thus, various stakeholders in India's aerospace sector should look to streamline the sanction and implementation processes to put in place solutions that can greatly increase the overall capacity handling of airports as well as reduce their respective carbon footprints and enhance safety. By doing so, the country's aviation hubs would also be able to handle a larger volume of air cargo and remove the current challenge of transport aircraft competing for take-off and landing space with commercial aircraft. Hence, various market players should aim to develop and offer the AAI solutions that will aid in creating a smarter airport ecosystem, which will in turn power both the local and national economies.<br><br><em>The author, Arijit Ghosh, is president, Honeywell Aerospace India</em></p>
