In a 20-day study across 3,500 flights, AAI used Aerios Airside Manager to quantify a 22% reduction in runway occupancy time at Chennai International Airport — granular evidence for an airfield investment that until recently could only be felt, not measured.
Chennai International Airport is one of the busiest airports in southern India, handling 450–470 flight movements daily through a single main runway. Operated under the Airports Authority of India, it is a strategic hub for both domestic and international traffic, with operations running 24×7 from a centralised AOCC.
Like all major Indian airports, Chennai is on a multi-year capacity expansion path. AAI has set a target of scaling the airport from its current 36 movements per hour to 45 movements per hour without additional runway construction — a goal that depends entirely on extracting more efficiency from the existing airfield infrastructure.
Airfield efficiency has always been understood intuitively. Controllers and ground operations teams know which exit taxiway shaves seconds off a turnaround. They know which stands push back faster. They know which runway directions cost time. But knowing isn’t measuring.
For decades, the operationally significant parameters of airside movement — chocks on, chocks off, runway occupancy time, actual taxi-in time, taxi-out time, taxi route used, stand occupancy — were either captured manually by ATC and ramp staff, or not captured at all. Manual capture is slow, sampled, and prone to error. The result: airfield investments — new rapid exit taxiways, stand reconfigurations, runway changes — couldn’t be validated with hard numbers across the population of flights.
Chennai Airport had built five Rapid Exit Taxiways aimed at scaling capacity to 45 flights per hour. The investments were significant. The intuition was sound. But until recently, AAI had no automated way to measure whether any individual RET was actually delivering the gains it was designed for.
Aerios Airside Manager (originally deployed at Chennai as AMCOMS, AAI-certified through the AAI Startup Initiative) is a specialised airside operations system. It correlates and fuses data from every available airside source into a single, real-time model of every aircraft and every ground vehicle on the airfield.
Blipper is a purpose-built airside vehicle transponder developed by Blunav. Until Blipper, the only objects trackable on the airfield in real time were aircraft. Blipper makes ground vehicles trackable too — follow-me cars, fuel trucks, baggage tugs, runway sweepers — with the same accuracy and the same data model as aircraft, all flowing into Aerios Airside Manager natively.
These data streams are correlated and processed by AI/ML algorithms in real time, producing a unified, accurate, fully-automated view of every airside movement — visualised on a single situational display in the AOCC.
Aerios Airside Manager captures airside movement data continuously, automatically, and without human intervention — for every flight, on every movement.
In addition to live operational use — situational awareness displays, real-time alerts, conformance alarms — every minute of airside movement is recorded and replayable across user-selected time windows. A direct consequence: every airfield investment becomes a hypothesis that can be tested against real data.
In July 2025, AAI conducted a 20-day study using Aerios Airside Manager to quantify the impact of RET Victor — the most recently commissioned of Chennai’s five rapid exit taxiways. The study covered approximately 3,500 flights, of which approximately 600 used RET Victor.
The findings, published by The Hindu in August 2025, quantify in airfield terms what the runway team had intuited — but the numbers themselves, at this level of granularity and confidence, were only possible because the measurement infrastructure was there to capture them.
AAI has indicated that similar studies will be repeated for the airport’s other RETs as wind patterns shift through the year. After November, when arrivals shift to the Pallavaram end of the runway, RET Zulu becomes operationally important — and a similar quantification study is planned.
This is the durable value of automated measurement: it doesn’t run once. It runs forever. Every airfield investment, every operational change, every rule update — each becomes a hypothesis that the data will eventually answer.
For Chennai’s airfield team, the loop is now closed: invest, measure, validate, decide what to invest in next. For AAI, it’s a model that can be replicated across the wider airport network.
Intuition built up over years of operating an airport from the inside is genuinely valuable. But it isn’t sharable, defensible, or scalable on its own.
Aerios Airside Manager turns intuition into infrastructure. Every parameter that has ever mattered to airside operations — captured, in real time, on every movement, with full audit trail and replay.
If your team is making airfield decisions you’d like to validate with data, we’d like to talk.