United Airlines In-Flight Wi-Fi Health Management: Revolutionizing Aircraft Connectivity through Real-time Prognostics and Big Data Analysis

This paper highlights an innovative initiative, focusing on Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) to enhance in-flight Wi-Fi performance by proactively identifying aircraft component failures. We propose a novel metric, the Normalized Wi-Fi Health Score (NWiHS), alongside a corresponding alerting mechanism, which together represents a significant advancement in the evaluation and improvement of in-flight Wi-Fi connectivity. To achieve this goal, we utilized big data consisting of millions of historical Wi-Fi heartbeats (HBs) received from each aircraft over the past three years. These HBs refer to periodic data packet transmissions sent from United’s aircraft to ground stations, providing crucial real-time insights into the Wi-Fi system’s status. Leveraging that data, we utilized advanced statistical methods to estimate a NWiHS - a robust indicator of aircraft-level connectivity performance, which quantifies the percent of missing Wi-Fi HBs normalized to exclude the effect of Wi-Fi provider performance and global coverage.