Unknown: 0:00

Music,

Matthew Weitzel: 0:07

celebrating 10 years of trailblazing in ground support Xcēd marks a decade as your leading partner in ground support equipment leasing at the forefront of both short term and long term leasing solutions. Xcēd adapts to your unique operational needs. Whether you're ramping up for peak season or planning for long term growth, we provide the right equipment to keep your operations running smoothly. This anniversary, we renew our dedication to empowering your ground operations with efficiency and innovation. With Xcēd, you're equipped for success today and prepare for the challenges of tomorrow. Exceed driving excellence on the ground year after year. Explore more at xcedgse.com

Terry Seaworth: 0:56

this is Laura McGrath,

Unknown: 0:57

this is Jennifer Mattison.

Terry Seaworth: 0:59

This is Sophie Skinner Jones and you are listening to the GSE podcast, all right. Well,

Matthew Weitzel: 1:05

good morning. I'm Matt Weitzel. I'm with Matt with Xcēd ground support equipment leasing, and host of the GSE podcast. So I don't know if you all are listeners or not. Me should have to check us out on all the major platforms. And today, we're here to talk about, you know, integrating autonomous vehicles into an airport environment. And to help me out with that, I have a full host of people here, panelists that are going to help me, because they are much smarter than I am, and they're going to help help us really kind of dive into this topic. All right, so the first question, Terry, you're up. So what excites you most about potential autonomous vehicles in your operations? So I work, you're not, you're not an operator, but yeah, I mean, you're, yeah, I

Terry Seaworth: 1:52

was gonna say airport, right? Airport consulting, yeah. And, you know, I think for for any airport, you have to look at what's going to solve a problem. So for airports, I would say there are pinch points or bottlenecks in the baggage handling process that could be improved by an efficient system that will transfer bags from point to point. When it's labor intensive to gather a few bags here, a few bags there. I would also say there's an opportunity to improve customer service. So, you know, an autonomous system that can prevent or minimize the number of loss or missing bags would be a huge boon to both the airlines and then the airport itself. Yeah,

Matthew Weitzel: 2:38

for sure. All right, you okay, down to Brian there. You guys introduce yourself. Oh, you know, we should definitely introduction, sorry. So Terry, Terry. HNTB, right. So um, if you tell us what you do? HNTB, sure.

Terry Seaworth: 2:52

Terry Seaworth, HNTB, I um. HNTB, does transportation consulting. I specifically have worked in aviation for the last 25 years, I do program and construction management for airports who are looking to expand their infrastructure.

Brian Wemple: 3:08

Brian, good morning. Folks. Start with the introduction, I guess so. My name is Brian Wemple pulling with the few moderator lines I've been since two live and I'm sure the but I actually just celebrated my 25 year anniversary with Piedmont last week. So I've been doing this for a little while, or some would say, probably too long, but actually started as a ground service employee in Tallahassee back in 1999 was a fun job when I was in college, and I've worked my way up. Right now, I'm a director we're seeing planning for Piedmont, obviously, GSE procurement. GSE projects is one of my passions, and one that I've worked on for many years, and not to direct sound too long. When back it was 22,009 2010 we were looking at Charlotte, one of our largest actually, it is our largest operation, where we do ground handling and just handling. And just for clarity, Piedmont is an airline that's owned by American Airlines, and we fly airplanes and we also provide ground handling services. Piedmont has ground handling in should be around 65 locations across the US. Our largest operation is in Charlotte. We have a large operation Philadelphia. One of my counterparts, Mr. Zavala, is a rent manager in Philadelphia, is with us. So we've got probably around 8000 ground handling employees across our system, so pretty good breadth of different work scopes that we have in our airports. We run the ground up for American here at GSP. And so while as you talk a bit more about the project, I think as we move it through, but again, just to give you a little bit of a background here, as we talk to the panel questions, let's see where was I going with this Charlotte being our largest operation, back in 2010 we. Embarked on a project that was back when grain technology was really kind of coming into the spotlight. We were looking at different opportunities of program with different entities, but we made the choice to go say we want to bring electric tractors into the operation. That was US Airways at the time. For those you know the history, obviously US Airways merged with American so at US Airways, that was the first time that program handling entity, I made the choice to go electric versus, say, like a regular, regular regulatory entity, something is forcing it to happen, and we've never looked back since we brought the electric tractors into the operation. We did a lot of work, planning, preparing, the employee groups, the maintenance groups, and it was a beautiful project. And we probably have just probably around 70, 6070, electric tractors. We got a fleet of 40 some electric pushbacks. I mean, the sky has been limited there. I still let this you know, from our perspective at Piedmont, and I think across America as a whole, there's absolutely a desire to try to branch out and in the right way, explore and implement new technologies that really make the operation better. And it's really a partnership with, you know, our employee groups, and also with you know, airport groups as well, to make sure that we can make this work well. And so we look forward to the potential that we have with this product. We're very interested in trying to create a product for our customers, and our customers being airline customers, and also American Airlines, we primarily service and providing a safe and reliable product. When we think about safe and reliable technologies like the track easy project is is one where we definitely see a lot of potential future opportunity.

Matthew Weitzel: 6:56

That's fantastic. Thank you so much. And Marty beat that introduction,

Marty Gray: 7:01

all right, I

Brian Wemple: 7:01

might have taken everybody's time.

Marty Gray: 7:05

Good morning. I'm Marty Gray. I am Air Canada director for ground support equipment and maintenance, like yourself, Brian, I've been around for quite some time. I'm in my 27th year now with Air Canada technical by trade, and here I am ultimately responsible for for what we do in our Canada underground support side. So thanks for having me. Oh, thank

Matthew Weitzel: 7:29

you so much.

Brian Wemple: 7:31

Good

Dave Edwards: 7:31

morning, everyone.

Ruben Aradas: 7:32

My name is Ruben Aradas. I work with UPS for about 32 years. Currently, I'm retired, so how about a better path to to my future, right? But I did spend six, six of those 32 years with the UPS Airlines, managing their ground support engineering department, and I'll keep it short, just so that we can move this along.

Brian Wemple: 7:58

Thanks. In the morning, I

Dave Edwards: 8:01

think I already made an introduction this morning, although I feel like morning, although I feel like they'll land on the stage because I've got 35 plus years in the airport business. So obviously, you guys, some of you guys, got a little ways to go. You know, as I mentioned at the airport here, we're all about innovation customer service. How do we improve things? You know, it's servicing our customers here at GSP, and since we do do things a little different than most airports around the country, and engage in business models that most airports don't do, like cargo handling as an example, and we do some passenger charter handling as well, and some airports do that around the country, but we we just really want to engage in things that are going to improve the overall level of service to our customers here at GSP. So we're excited about any time that we can bring new technology to the table that helps us do that. Yeah, for sure.

Marty Gray: 8:49

All right, let's,

Matthew Weitzel: 8:50

let's pass it back to Brian here. Let's, let's give Brian's opinion on so what excites the most about potential autonomous vehicles in your operations? Yeah, absolutely. I

Brian Wemple: 8:59

try to try to keep it a little shorter. Going forward, I was trying to do two answers, introduction and answering the original question. So but really, to piggyback off what I said earlier, it's the excitement, I think is really about the opportunities that are presented with a vehicle like this. I think everybody knows what exists out there on the market today, obviously on road vehicles, and the understanding of what they're capable of doing, what the potential is down the road for those vehicles. And so we look at that, and we look at the airport environment, we are thinking, Okay, now we got a situation where we have probably even a more control environment than what you have like on road, and taking some of those opportunities you have from the perspective of safety and also, of course, efficiency, bringing those elements into the airport environment. How many guys have driven on the airport ramp before, especially if a lot you know, around a lot of different airplanes, right? Same time? Charlotte airport is one that I've driven on the ramp many times Philadelphia. Never driven in Philly, but I think Dave is probably. Driven me in Philly before you realize really quickly how much risk actually exists in the operation, right? And you know, the folks that we have working on the tarmac, you know, we have a lot of great folks that have been doing it for a lot of years. We all have folks they've been doing it for a very short period of time. And you put those folks out there, it's an over hacking guys, I mean, and so when we talk about safety and we talk about the opportunities that we can bring equipment into the operation that can increase that level through technology, you know, again, it's something where we should definitely be looking at this. We're silly for not looking at it, because it's something that, you know, I don't sound extreme, but I mean, it's something that could potentially save a life, right? And so it's important to us. And so I think this is a really good, structured way in doing this type of review of the technology in order to get to that point where we can have, you know, effective potential rollouts in the future, and so really safety, obviously, efficiency, and I think to a certain extent, reliability as well. So I think those would be the three top things that I'd be looking forward to with this type of technology.

Matthew Weitzel: 11:12

That's great answer, Marty, do you want to you and talk about what kind of excites you about the autonomous Sure.

Marty Gray: 11:18

I mean, the excitement for me is really the unknown, right? If you look at, you know, what has come into our industry over the last couple of years, I mean, the potential to operate fundamentally different than we ever had before is ponds, if you look what electrification in itself has brought, and then, you know, really fast forward, a lot of technology for aircraft damage mitigation, the you know, the employees safety, essentially the safety of our people, our facilities, our assets, so on, so forth. This whole lot of fundamental change. And I think now that we're starting to talk about autonomous vehicles. Air side, like this is a huge, huge opportunity. That's how we see it. You know, the performance side is certainly one thing when you talk about reliability for delivering bags point to point. But how do we operate on a ramp? You know, this is, this is what excites me. It's right now. It said it's, it's unknown on on the autonomous side, but we see really bearing fruit in other markets. On it industries. It's very, very evident that it's, it's going to be successful in in an airport suburb. Yeah, I

Matthew Weitzel: 12:33

agree. Yeah. Let's, let's talk to Ruben, even though you're retired Reb, and I'm sure you have plenty, plenty of great ideas here. Yeah.

Ruben Aradas: 12:41

I mean, we view autonomy. We think that there's three key benefits to autonomy, right? The first one is to improve safety, right? Who doesn't want to improve safety? We also see it as increasing the efficiency of the operation. For us, time is our enemy in the cargo business, right? Every minute matters to us, and any minute we can save is beneficial to our on time performance. And then the third thing, I would say, is reduction and maintenance cost, right? So when you put all, all three of those things together, you know you're getting a better way of generating revenue and profit because you're not having to to maintain you're improving the safety and you're increasing the operational efficiency of of the work that's being done. So there's other things that also benefit from autonomy. We talked about electric vehicles. So sustainability comes into that. And I think what the the elephant in the room is, is to at some point offset labor, right? Because that's really where much of the cost saving is going to come from.

Matthew Weitzel: 13:56

So Ruben broke away about it. She want to ask you something, so why do you think the cost of maintenance will go down with an autonomous vehicle. Well,

Ruben Aradas: 14:03

if you work at UPS, we know how to destroy equipment. There's a lot more play on ramp. I don't know how much money we spend on paint and touch up from scratching equipment damaging equipment. If you've ever seen an aircraft maintenance pickup truck after a year, it looks like it should go to the junk pile, right? So we think we're going to be able to eliminate a lot of that unnecessary maintenance to the equipment. And you know, the vehicles are driving themselves, like a grandfather would drive his car, right? It takes care of itself. It performs to the optimal level, but at the same time, including the reliability of that piece of equipment.

Matthew Weitzel: 14:45

Okay, thank you. That's a great answer, or you can hand it down to Dave there.

Dave Edwards: 14:50

Yeah, I don't know that I can really add a whole lot to what's what we said down the panel. I mean, safety, reliability, cost reductions in the future. I mean all of those things are. Important again to us here at the district, as I mentioned, because we do run our own cargo operation. In particular, I think the key, and this was mentioned earlier as well, is there's no better place to test this kind of technology than on an airport in a controlled environment. And I say that as I mentioned during my opening remarks, that we've been delving in for the last 1113, years, automated slash autonomous movement of passengers, and some of that discussion that revolved around mixed traffic, autonomous vehicles, and I just don't believe that's there yet. It's not going to be there for quite some time. While. We have some companies out here around the country, like Waymo, who are running in Phoenix and a few other places. The reality, at the end of the day is it's still very much in its infancy. So I think dedicated areas, anyone we're going to put it in place here, from a passenger movement perspective, it would be dedicated right of ways that controlled environment on the airfield is really conducive to try to move forward with tests with this technology and accrue that it simply can be effective and that it will be effective force in the future. Okay,

Matthew Weitzel: 16:06

you want to hand the mic back down to the Terry here. So, Terry, what challenges do you foresee integrating autonomous vehicles into an airport? Well,

Terry Seaworth: 16:15

I was, I was actually going to ask if I could respond to what Dave just saw, no, because that's the question that I that I sort of see fitting in. It's it's great to hear Dave talking about as an airport looking forward to implementing this on an airfield, because that's a good testing environment. I feel like a lot of airport owners will feel very challenged with that statement, because they think, Well, if it doesn't work on the roads, why would I trust it around both pedestrians and aircraft that are multi million dollars to repair if they're hit? So I think one of the challenges to bringing this to an airport is getting the folks who need to make the investment ready, you know, building that trust and the confidence that this is the right solution. And again, as a consultant, I'm always thinking, Well, I have to solve a problem. I can't I can't bring anything to the table if I can't offer a solution to a problem that they either already have or don't know that they have, that can be solved. And you know, maybe we can help leverage technology, data, or in this case, you know, autonomous vehicles, which right, should be safer than you know, folks who might be distracted have not got enough sleep last night. So I think there is sort of the, can we identify the low hanging fruit? So you talked about, you worry about people driving out on the ramp. So how can we take the kind of the pool of people and identify where's their stress point? Maybe it's running a bed from one gate to another knowing that they're under the gun. So we let that be an autonomous procedure, but the regular operations, you know, your folks are well trained, and you know, it's a well, well oiled machine when they do that process over and over again? Yeah,

Matthew Weitzel: 18:04

I think that's an incredible answer. Brian, do you know what challenges you foresee, like integrating autonomous into your

Brian Wemple: 18:10

operation? Yeah, that's it's a good question. It's a tough one, because there, it's always tough to talk about the challenges, right? But I think in order to make sure that you have a successful solution implemented, right? You've got to identify those as best as possible, try to mitigate the risks associated with them. You know, I think for for us at Piedmont, we're part of, obviously, a very large machine, so to speak, right? And we have a lot of, you know, policies and rules and a lot of stuff has been built over time, right to make sure that we have, you know, as high level of safety as possible. And so I think one of the biggest challenges, and this is whether it's also the ground handler, working with the airport, working with regulatory agencies, it's starting to kind of try to rethink, you know, all these different elements in light of what we have available potentially here as new technology to have these production. Productive, I should say, excuse me, productive review of how do we implement changes, because all of our policies are written around somebody like, say, being in a vehicle, driving it. So how do you rewrite the policies out there to say, Okay, I'm gonna you know somebody you know on an iPad or whatever is gonna actually get this vehicle to go from point A to point B. And how do we change how we handle airplanes to allow that to work? And there's a lot of different groups involved in making this a successful process, right? Even today, we'll talk about what we have in place for rules, regulations and whatnot, so getting different groups together and having the productive conversations to try to come up with. Solutions that embrace, you know, what this technology can potentially do to me, feels like probably one of the biggest challenges out there, but certainly something I think that's achievable. And I honestly think that this meeting today, this demonstration at the airport, is probably a good example of what we can do in order to try to start breaking down some of those walls so speak right and coming up with solutions that are very meaningful. See, you know, you take baby steps, right? And this seems like a really good opportunity to kind of take one of those first steps towards what the opportunity potentially lies ahead, but definitely trying to, in essence, rewrite the playbook, right with bringing in this new technology, for sure, it's going to be, I think, for us, would be one of these challenges, yeah,

Matthew Weitzel: 20:49

what regulatory challenges do you think you'll have? And who are those challenges come from?

Brian Wemple: 20:54

So that's good question. I think, generally speaking, working on the airfield, we have federal patients. I mean, we've got FAA, even potential, I don't know, again, in thinking about it from a security perspective, I mean, TSA, you know, obviously local airport authorities have control over elements, so when we talk about those particular environments, right? We have also on the company side, we've got labor groups, right, that we have to work with contractual items that we have to review, and then just company policy, right? One of the ways that we provide a consistent, you know, safe and reliable operation, then, is by teaching employees to go step by step by step in the process, right? And so now all of a sudden we got to teach the employees, okay, you've done that this way. We taught you to go this way. Now, you know, forget all that. Now, do this way. Again, that way, right? It's for one or the other, right? So I'm oversimplifying it, but I mean, if you kind of give me, it's creating those new processes right in place, and training folks on how to do that. And then, you know, we talked about reliability. So what do we do if we have a problem with a piece of equipment, right? And so we have to have pieces in place for that. Can we fix it? You know, what's our back or fall back plan? Because ultimately, if I'm a customer on an airplane, and I'm flying from Greenville, Spartanburg to Albany, New York, and as a customer, my expectation is, is that my bag travels with me, if I talk about specifically luggage handling on branch, so we can sit here and tell a customer, well, you know, hey, look, sorry the autonomous vehicle had a fault. Yay, autonomous vehicles. But customers like, that's great. I'm on the bag. So ultimately, we have to have steps in place that can ensure that we can continue to form reliably, and the technology could be 100% one spot, which is great, but we don't have processes and training and, you know, approvals and all that, the whole that stuff, right? We have we run that race, basically a failure customer, so and so that's where we just have to be very careful, right in terms of implementation. That's, again, kind of is back to where I would see probably one of the biggest challenges that we have with technology. You have

Matthew Weitzel: 23:10

another Marty, and we can kind of talk to him about this,

Marty Gray: 23:14

but I mean outside, know, the physical factors of such a vehicle operating. How ramp congested, ramp areas, you know, it's a ramp for the best. Is very, very dynamic. You know, there's always movement, particularly in the hubs that we operate in public Canada. But to much bigger scale. On top of that is a change management element to this. Again, when I spoke about, you know, the fundamental changes of how we're looking to operate on the ramp compared to how we've done previously. What was very important to us, aside the safeties and so on so forth. But is that, is that employee buy in that culture, not losing any traction on that equally critical is, you know, the alignment of ourselves, or Canada in this, in this position, to that of partners that are also looking to embrace this, this sort of innovation you spoke about, you know, GSPs, you know, involvement reception to, you know, essentially providing a safe, controlled work environment. I mean, that's that's key, you know, even to get any sort of traction in getting these into a deployable state. So I think, from our standpoint right now, to come out of the gate, it's really about that they'll lose sight of the development with our people, and then align ourselves with the appropriate partners to embrace this and really get everything out that it's intended to do.

Matthew Weitzel: 24:48

Yeah, and I think events like this are important for everybody to be able to kind of see that this could work. And I think it's really important that we're here today nobody can kind of see this thing in action. So, Reuben, what do you. See is like the biggest challenges

Ruben Aradas: 25:02

for us. Some of the biggest challenges are when you have to try to overcome adversity, right? Whether it be some software upgrade that disables the unit or causes it to Malfunction. Malfunction, functions are always an issue, right? How was the is the technology and the architecture robust enough to withstand the weather, the temperature, the humidity of the operation, at the speed of the operation? I mean, all those things occur, and then what happens is, let's say the system shuts down. Let's say we have bad weather day, for example, right? And you're not able to use the autonomous vehicles because of the line of sight or whatever, the technology just doesn't work in that weather condition. Now you're left with putting people into that vehicle. Are those people going to be trained to operate that vehicle, and has their skill diminished over time because they haven't been in that vehicle for a period of time, right? So all those safety concerns start to come up in bad weather, right? So those are things that you have to think through when you're when you're adding this technology or these type of vehicles into your operations. So those are, those are some of the big challenges for us, and it's the people have to understand how to deal with these type of severe conditions, right? So if you don't have people that are trained to act immediately, right, it becomes chaos, and the whole system just shuts down. So I think those are some of the biggest challenges that we're going to be faced with. But when we started to introduce this technology into our operations,

Matthew Weitzel: 26:44

yeah, I'm excited to talk to track decent today about that, because I know they've made some numerous upgrades, even recently, in regards to weather, weather coming in, and the way that the the same offering those. So we will discuss that later on today, and then you'll have a chance to respond to that. And then, Dave, what do you see as a challenge for the airport side?

Dave Edwards: 27:05

Yeah, I think there's probably a couple there. You mentioned some of your mentioned regulatory, you know, trying to get the FAA on board with this is not always easy. We've been playing in the realm of some automated, autonomous mowing of grass as an example, which is a little closer to the airfield. And these vehicles will be running on the ramp, and that's been a little problematic for the FAA and trying to convince them that we can implement that type of a piece of equipment in a safe and efficient way on the airfield. So I think that'll be one vehicle can get past with those guys, but I think we can get it done. You know, I think the discussion of how do you transition from autonomous to a person operating the vehicle is important, and I don't, I don't want this to sound scary, but you know, if you think back to some of the struggles that have happened in aviation over the years. In particular, the one that comes to mind for me was the Asiana crash at San Francisco Airport several years ago. You know, most foreign pilots, and figure in this case, those pilots flying for Asiana were well trained, but they were well trained, mostly in automation, and so when they got the alerts on final approach that they had a problem. They did not react fast enough to take over control of the airplane and the aircraft. Aircraft ended up crashing. You know, fortunately, on the crash itself, there wasn't any loss of life. There were. There was some loss of life, and the response that happened by the fire department, the office department there at SFO, but I think that is a key point is, is having people that don't, you know, we can rely too much on automation to the point that when we need to step in manually, because, let's face it, equipment fails. I mean, it just happens. You know, we thought a little bit of what those two or three weeks ago, we had CrowdStrike shut down the aviation system around the world for several hours. At some airlines had a very difficult time getting back online. So how do those things impact this? When we talk about technology and autonomy and reliance on those systems in order to run these types of operations, I think is really going to be key as well. Yeah,

Matthew Weitzel: 29:15

I agree. Let's come back to down to Brian here, and Brian, what specific tasks or operations do you think the autonomous vehicle can handle effectively is in your operation? Yeah,

Brian Wemple: 29:29

we can have a lot of thoughts. I know we've talked to Baptiste rich. I mean, I've all tracked busy team about this for a number of years. I was a trade show probably five years ago, we were in the autonomous shuttle personnel shuttle, right? So we've had this on our mind for a number of years, for sure, and we have looked at different options that we've had. I mean, there's, there's definitely a lot of potential opportunity, and I think some of the. Points being made about that balance of having workers ready to work the operation compared to having autonomous equipment available. Generally speaking, I feel like autonomous vehicles really are a great opportunity to invest and supplement what you're doing in the operation. So as we talk through this, and I think about it, I think at least for us, you know, I really see this as an opportunity to bring opportunities and to supplement what we're doing today. So so much to say, like here in Greenville, Spartanburg, maybe, you know, for one outbound flight, we run our bags with person, and then the next Outbound Flight runs with an autonomous vehicle, and then we can flip it around. So banks going from a tail for an arriving flight could be run with an autonomous vehicle on one and then it could be with a person another. So it kind of a concept of mixing it up. May be a good opportunity there to introduce, you know, the opportunity for efficiencies. When I think about staffing levels at an airport, it's highly dependent on how many airplanes you have on the ground at a given time. And so airline scheduling, unfortunately, is one where we're trying to maximize, obviously, profitability in the market, but sometimes that means flight schedules will get what we call peaked, where we have 20 flights a day. I'm just using random numbers here for GSP, but at those 20 flights today, you might have four of them on the ground right at the same time. They're not evenly spread out. And so when we talked about introducing autonomous vehicles in the operation, well we know we're never going to not have any staff at an airport, right? And so for us, what we see is, when you have those four flights a day, can you have the time you come in and basically reduce the burden versus us having to bring more labor in to cover, in essence, what would be, what I would say like a short peak, right? And so when we talk about opportunity, it's really about trying to kind of normalize the labor requirement of a given operation by bringing in, you know, the autonomous type equipment that would allow us to rationalize, you know, the peak demands of the operation. And that's a benefit, not only in schedule operation, but also off schedule operations. I know GSP is a proud crowd that's is a recipient of a lot of diverting flights. Right? Come from from like Charlotte or Atlanta, and they can't land there they appear. And so that would be another good example of off schedule operations where we don't expect to have airplanes here, we have a plan for them, then all of a sudden they're here, right? And if we have reliable, autonomous solutions that could help us manage those types of unplanned activity, that would also provide a lot of benefit in the operation. Obviously, we're looking at luggage tractors. So, I mean, we're talking about the opportunity of moving luggage, you know, around the airports. That's what we kind of looked at right now. And so, I mean, there's, there's obviously a lot of activity there with that, but there's the potential in the future also to look at other functions of the operation, such as, you know, aircraft for chefs, right? What's to say that we can't have a autonomous vehicle performing that function of actually pushing the aircraft back from the gate? So and again, it's a it's a demand that exists in the operation. And I think in an airport environment, there's a lot of opportunity to kind of control how that function would occur, because ramps right, being, you know, location of the geographic, you know, limitations, whatever it's you have a lot of control in an airport environment, and so it does provide a lot of potential opportunity for that type of stuff. So those are just some examples of things that we've seen or thought about looking forward. Okay, and

Matthew Weitzel: 33:39

Marty, would you like to respond

Marty Gray: 33:41

much like you just said, you know, all that same like opportunity, right? Yeah. I mean, we will, we will look to deploy such technology and innovation in areas where there's opportunity, and we don't know, but internally we don't know. We're too immature, yeah, for this at this time. But what I can tell you is, you know, based on the conversations that we've had thus far, and those who we have speak, been speaking with for do create opportunity. It's point to point. You know, I don't want to make this more complex than it needs to be to get right, but simple touch time, point to point, off the tail, onto a cart, to a carousel, right? This gets to a place where we can start measuring let's start looking at safety. Let's start looking at performance. Start small, but I can tell you, I'm also going into this with no, no finish line, if you will. I would love to already start thinking about pushing back aircraft with similar type technology. I mean, this is a reality of what we're doing right now, but starting small and getting it right, getting it valued. When you talk about the inside operations of our cargo warehousing, I mean, I see that already being doable, given that we're seeing it in other industries, doing it in a production. Or a facility manufacturing type application. So I didn't see any reason why we couldn't deploy something like that in our cargo operations today. Again, taking a step back to make sure that we get, you know, the kit, the culture, employing, buy in, the communication, and these are all things that, you know, I feel we need to have softly in place before we just go to deployment. But for us, you know, we're thinking, really, I feel like we're thinking really, really big to the point, yeah, that, you know, there's a real attraction to be one day pushing back aircraft with with this sort of technology.

Matthew Weitzel: 35:34

Yep. And then Ruben, does this look like a little bit easier for a cargo carrier?

Ruben Aradas: 35:40

Well, we don't see a an autonomous cargo tracker, for example, as something that would be easier for us. You know, we're more interested in some of the things that we may talk about later, and some of the the the material that you received today, where an autonomous dolly makes more sense to us, right? Like I said, Time is our enemy. Every minute that we can get back helps our customer. So we need to find a way to get that time back, and we think that autonomous dollies is the way to do that. We can move one dolly at a time. We could network the dollies to go wherever they want and get them there much quicker than we can pulling three containers at a time with a tuff right? Because typically what happens in our operation is we have to wait for those containers to be loaded. So if the first one is loaded, it can't go anywhere until the last one is loaded, and so that volume just sits there until all of the containers are ready to go, and then they get moved out to the aircraft. Whereas if we were able to move one valley at a time, we're able to get some of that time back. If we were to just get a minute back, or 30 seconds, and we got to load an airplane that's got 30 containers in it, do the math, you know, that's 30 minutes or 15 minutes that you get back in just that amount of time.

Matthew Weitzel: 37:00

Terry Do you want to Terry real quick? So will there be any structural changes that need to be made to accommodate autonomous vehicles?

Terry Seaworth: 37:09

That's a good question. So right? The difference differences between autonomous vehicles and people driving them, of course, the you know, charging stations or depots for maybe immediate storage points for baggage or cargo, you know, while they wait for a different tug to pick them up or to be to be grouped together in another in a different order to go to their destination. I do feel like an airport would probably need to consider how the ramp space is used. Do autonomous vehicles need more space to turn around and queue, or less space. So yes, I do think there wouldn't have to be some some sort of structural changes to accommodate autonomous the differences between autonomous vehicles and the way that we as humans drive drive vehicles. I think, though, there's the advantage to having the additional technology and data would outweigh those modifications. So the fact that an autonomous vehicle can have knowledge of the entire system at any given point in time and know how many bags are yet expected to be loaded onto that flight, or perhaps in the future, they would even know the weight of the bags and that could feed to the weights and measurements calculations that the pilot has to make. I feel like, you know, as somebody mentioned, baby steps, this kind of being the first step of many to get us more information, more data and more efficiency to the operation.

Matthew Weitzel: 38:36

That's a great answer. Yeah, I appreciate that. So I think this is probably going to be the last question. I think we have really kind of gone over a lot today. But so what are you going to be looking for today from the demo like, what will you what will your eyes be focused on? What we'd be looking at and what's important to you? I

Terry Seaworth: 38:52

hope I know, but you might answer a lot of questions. But you know, of course, the demonstration like this, I really appreciate all the energy that's gone into it, but I actually have questions from my colleagues who are very interested, but couldn't participate today, about weather, which has already been kind of discussed operationally, some of the things that we expect autonomous vehicles to do well. And then, you know, where are their shortcomings? Where are we going to have to fit the human component back into the operation. You know, training was a really good one. How do we train people now to work around autonomous vehicles? What do they need to expect? What do they need to do in response? So, yes, I definitely planning to ask a

Matthew Weitzel: 39:36

lot to push. For sure. Yes, all right, Brian, what

Dave Edwards: 39:39

are you going to be looking for

Brian Wemple: 39:41

today? I think talking with rich yesterday, and he volunteered to demonstrate the collision avoidance rates on the vehicle. So he's going to stand in front of one and make sure it stops. I think this is my first opportunity to actually see this particular vehicle in the. In the operation at Newark, we talked about the bunch. So I think it's, you know, a kid with a brand new, like, game console or something that's like,

Matthew Weitzel: 40:11

don't either wide open, like, Okay, wow. Where we, you know,

Brian Wemple: 40:13

what do we even, you know, they don't even know what they're stepping into, right? Because it's so exciting. There's so much potential. I think that's just that just trying to absorb as much as possible about what we can observe learn with the equipment, and then take that knowledge that we learned today and then just start thinking more about getting what can we do with it? What are the questions? Where do we need to kind of investigate further? So it's really for us, just part of the journey of learning more. And again, I think for today, it's just learn as much as we can working with folks here in this meeting and just collaborate, obviously, and learn from each other, and then use it to work with the product designers manufacturers, to say, Hey, these are events. How do we go make this work? Yeah,

Matthew Weitzel: 41:04

exactly. All right. Marty, yeah,

Marty Gray: 41:06

just in John, just I'm excited to see it for all the conversations and meetings, drawings, pamphlets I've looked at, oh, this. It's time to see it. That's where we're at. And then see it, touch it, feel it. And I know that that's, you know, that will drive all kinds of conversations for our trip home and answering some of these questions for ourselves. You know, hey, now that you seen it, what does opportunity look like? You know, it'll, it'll, it'll just answer a lot of questions on ourselves. Yeah, I'm excited to see it.

Ruben Aradas: 41:39

Yeah, yeah. For us, we've actually had the opportunity to do some demos at our major gateway in Louisville, and when we started those demonstrations, we knew right away that the technology just wasn't ready. So that's what we're going to be looking for. You know, are you bringing a finished product to the operation, right? And does it operate reliably? Does it operate without errors? Or the word we don't like to use, failure? And what questions are going to come up? Right? There's going to be lots of questions. How does it operate on an infield? What happens when there's a change? When you change the operating environment, if you're making right turns all the time, and all of a sudden now you got to make left turns. What happens to that vehicle? If you have to change or they new facility, new building goes up, what happens to the travel path of that vehicle as structures get in its way as construction takes place at an airport, right? What happens to to the vehicle when all of these things are challenging its ability to operate? So that's, that's what we're going to be looking for, is what, what you questions, what, where, how the innovation has improved right over the last few years from when we did our testing, that's what we're going to be looking for. Okay,

Dave Edwards: 43:05

I think for the airport, you know, we want to, really want to see how all of you in this room respond to technology that's here and me presented today. And I think we're just scratching the surface still on this, lots of questions to be answered. You don't know what we don't know at this point, until you see it rolled out in the operating environment, we're going to continue to learn, and that's what we have to do from this. But I think that's where autonomous vehicles can help us with that. So I'm excited to see the response today, see the vehicle in operation again, and then just Garner feedback from this group as to what you think the opportunities are in your operations. My team will be evaluating it. From our perspective, cargo operation, what we do here on the airport, but I'm really interested to hear from a lot of the folks in this room as to what their concerns are or and hopefully a lot of excitement after we finish things. Today's day,

Matthew Weitzel: 44:04

well, let's give our panelists a big round of applause. Thank you for tuning in to this episode of the GSE podcast. We hope you found it informative and engaging. If this episode resonated with you, please share it with your colleagues and peers in the ground support equipment community, your support is invaluable to us. We'd appreciate it if you could take a moment to rate and review our podcast. Your feedback not only encourages us, but also helps expand our reach within the GSE community. Keep an eye out for more episodes as we continue to explore the dynamic world of ground operations, bringing you the latest trends, insights and stories from the industry. Thank you for listening to the GSE podcast until we meet again. Stay grounded and keep pushing forward. You.