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Skytrac has received a Canadian patent, with U.S. patent pending, for a bill-by-the-mile flight tracking solution that allows air ambulance operators to improve the accuracy of reporting on billable distances.
“To minimize their satellite communications costs, most operators opt to receive GPS position reports only every one or two minutes. The assumption is that an aircraft travels in a straight path between these reporting intervals. In most industries, this is sufficient to safely monitor the position of aircraft in flight. However, for air ambulance operators where the client is billed based on a loaded mile, deviations in flight paths for weather, obstacles or air traffic control can add to the true cumulative distance travelled. When aggregated fleet-wide over time, this difference can have a significant revenue impact,” said Skytrac president, Malachi Nordine.
The patented Skytrac high-resolution tracking solution records flight data for every second of flight. This detailed flight path information is then compressed and sent over the Iridium satellite network at the operator’s standard one- or two-minute reporting interval.
“We are maximizing the data sent with each satellite transmission. With this one-second flight path resolution, we’ve detected as much as a 15 per cent improvement in billable distance on a single rotary flight. In developing this technology, our goal was to produce a more efficient flight-following solution that allows operators with a bill-by-the-mile model to better manage their business by understanding true flight paths,” continued Nordine.
