The challenge

As the national provider of air navigation services, SANS must anticipate future traffic volumes, allocate resources efficiently, and ensure airspace capacity keeps pace with rising demand. To achieve this successfully, teams required access to high-quality, forward-looking, and historical aviation schedules and status data in a single location, enabling them to support and enhance the capabilities of their existing tools, processes, and data sources.

SANS relied on limited in-house datasets and manual research to build assumptions around future traffic and booking volumes. This made it difficult to manage data quality, maintain accuracy, respond quickly, and scale forecasting efforts to meet growing internal demand.

Without a comprehensive view of upcoming schedules, Air Traffic Flow Management Teams were required to allocate significant time and resources to generating daily operational forecasts for Saudi airspace, which affected overall operational efficiency. Manual processes created bottlenecks within Data Management Teams, increasing the time needed to derive actionable insights. As a result, strategic planning proceeded at a more measured pace, and senior leadership lacked real-time access to data-driven insights, which modestly limited the organization’s ability to respond and adapt with optimal agility.

It was clear that a more scalable, reliable solution that provides high-quality data with near-real-time updates was required.

The solution

Partnering with OAG, SANS implemented the full Flight Info Direct data suite, including Schedules, Historical Data, Master Data, and more.

Powered by Snowflake, Flight Info Direct is the industry's first single-source global aviation data platform to contain Supply, Demand, and Pricing data sets, providing the clearest view of the aviation landscape.

Ready to query, integrate, and analyse, Flight Info Direct eliminates data silos and enables cross-department collaboration by unlocking the industry's most trusted single source of truth. Completely customizable, it delivers the freshest and highest-quality global and granular insights, empowering teams and driving smarter decision-making across the organisation.

Let's take a look at how SANS uses some of the data sets in more detail:

Schedules data powers SANS' Strategic Forecasting framework, strengthening forecasting accuracy, supporting proactive decision-making, and enhancing long-term strategic planning. With Schedules data, SANS unlocked the most accurate forward-looking insights, refreshed daily, and captures over 400,000 global flight schedule changes a day.

Historical data provides SANS with deeper context for understanding current trends and contributes to developing and refining predictive models. With near real-time updates, Historical data offers global core schedule information dating back to 2004, configurable by airline and airport.

Master data underpins the vast amount of data SANS processes in its analytics. Teams across the organisation can trust that they have the highest quality data at their fingertips. OAG's Master data set standardises variations across the industry, ensuring consistency in airport, airline, and aircraft information.

With Flight Info Direct deployed across multiple departments at SANS, from the Air Traffic Flow Management team to executive strategy, OAG's Schedules, Historical, and Master data underpin and power dashboards, driving accurate daily forecasts and reliable monthly reporting frameworks.

The results

95%+ Forecast Accuracy

SANS integrates Schedules data into its Strategic Forecasting framework, consistently achieving less than 5% deviation across domestic, international, and overflight segments. This level of accuracy supports more reliable and proactive capacity planning and ensures consistent achievement of critical internal KPI targets.

Operational Forecasting in Hours, Not Days

The Air Traffic Flow Management team uses OAG data to power daily forecasts for Saudi airspace. The improved data has:

• Significantly reduced the team’s workload from 10 working days to just 4 hours, freeing up resources for higher-value and proactive initiatives

• Delivered <5% deviation from actuals on most days, enabling confident decision-making and minimising operational surprises

• Required minimal manual input, limited to rare seasonal anomalies or exceptional events

With accurate data and greater efficiency, the Air Traffic Flow Management Team can focus on proactively managing traffic flow, optimising resources, responding quickly to anomalies, and achieving faster results.

Innovative Predictive Model Development

To strengthen forecasting further, SANS’ Data Science Team leverages OAG’s historical data to develop and continuously refine predictive models. These models support data-led decision-making across both operational and strategic contexts:

• Departure punctuality forecasting

• Taxi-out delay estimations

• Arrival punctuality forecasting

• Overflight volume prediction across Saudi airspace

• Route capacity utilisation projections

With its investment in innovation, SANS harnesses the most cutting-edge technology from OAG to deliver powerful and informed predictions across various contexts and departments.

Executive briefing alignment

SANS’ Data Management Team can now build better, more accurate, powerful, and versatile reports, including the CEO’s Briefing Report. The monthly executive review highlights:

• Detailed and customized passenger booking trends and analyses, per carrier and route

• Forward-looking overviews for the next 30–60 days, highlighting anticipated peaks and troughs in traffic

These insights are now central to high-level decision-making, providing a consistent, accurate view of the aviation landscape on which leadership teams can confidently act.

Enhanced master Data for Analytics

With OAG’s Master data, SANS enriched its internal lookup systems for aircraft, carriers, and airport locations, reducing data-mapping errors and streamlining analytics development. Now used daily by over 100 SANS employees, teams can access the cleanest, most up-to-date data to unlock the insights they need, when they need them.

Partnering with OAG has enabled SANS to work more efficiently, eliminate data silos, and accelerate smarter, more collaborative decision-making. SANS has successfully transformed its forecasting, planning, and reporting capabilities by seamlessly accessing the highest-quality aviation data on the market. With OAG data, SANS continues to adapt and innovate, optimising Saudi Arabia’s evolving airspace operations with clarity, speed, and accuracy.