Air travel company helps businesses prepare for H1N1 with pandemic planning and management

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Air travel companies could provide a worthy model for health organizations as well as government agencies to emulate during the upcoming flu season. OAG, a leading provider of global airline data and intelligence, has developed a working prototype to assist health organizations and government agencies in preparing their strategies to combat the spread of pandemic diseases, including the H1N1 virus and other flu strains.

The OAG tool allows government departments and health organizations to visualize and model in elapsed time precisely how a disease can spread from any single airport in the world, on any day within the future schedules time-frame as well as which cities and airports could be alerted of potential impact as elapsed time from original departure time increases.

“The world is now truly a global village where it is possible to reach almost any other point on the planet by air within just one day,” said John Weber, Senior Vice President, OAG Aviation. “Flu bugs don’t buy their own tickets; they travel with passengers at the same speed as aircraft. Understanding the logical path of travellers over a global network of connecting flights could be a major milestone in helping to minimize the escalation of any new epidemic.”

The tool also outlines exactly which carriers should be alerted at down-line connection points, which carriers may already be impacted and how many (maximum) passengers could be exposed to a disease as time passes.

“We have been working on this prototype since the first outbreak of the H1N1 virus and are now in a position to engage more fully with organizations to help them with their preparedness plans,” Weber continued. “Our initial discussions with government departments have confirmed our view that there is real value in using our data to predict where a virus may travel over the commercial air lanes. What we bring to the party is the reliability of our global schedules data, our experience with data integration and applications, and a very useful tool that allows planners to visualize the data in terms of global geography. Our technology is very flexible so planners can lift user defined portions of OAG data into an existing work environment.”

The product will contain flight schedules data for all direct flights and connections for every airport around the globe. Each flight is based on actual future flight schedules, and each connection reflects industry standard minimum connect times which vary from carrier to carrier and airport to airport. The application, which allows planners to define and view progressive global connectivity, is a user-friendly tool requiring only a few minutes of explanation. A unique feature of the tool allows planners to define any origin point, and by using a slider bar for elapsed time from origin point departure, lets the user see how far a flu bug could spread in minutes or hours. The tool presents the results either as a graphic display or in data table format that can be exported for further analysis.

The OAG airline schedules database is widely regarded as the most complete and accurate information available, with the most up-to-date direct and connecting flight details of more than 900 airlines and over 3,500 airports.

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