Driving precision in forecasting and airspace management: how sans optimizes saudi airspace with flight info direct
SANS' Story
Saudi Air Navigation Services (SANS) is the exclusive provider of air navigation services in Saudi Arabia, ensuring the safety, efficiency, and reliability of the Kingdom’s airspace. Headquartered in Jeddah, SANS plays a vital role in advancing Vision 2030 by managing over 330 million passengers annually and supporting 4.5 million tons of cargo across 2.2 million km² of airspace. Since its corporatization in 2016, SANS has evolved into a trusted organization delivering end-to-end air traffic management—from flight planning to post-flight services—while embracing innovation, sustainability, and strategic growth.
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 analyze, 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 organization.
Let's take a look at how SANS uses some of the data sets in more detail:
Flight Info Direct provides SANS with direct access to the industry's most trusted Schedules, Historical, and Master data sets. By combining these data sets, SANS uncovers powerful, versatile insights that inform decision-making across teams.
Master data underpins the vast amount of data SANS processes in their analytics. Teams across the organization can trust that they have the highest quality data at their fingertips. OAG's Master data set standardizes variations across the industry, ensuring consistency in airport, airline, and aircraft information.
Learn moreWith 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.
sans' 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 minimizing 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, optimizing 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 utilization 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
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, optimizing Saudi Arabia’s evolving airspace operations with clarity, speed, and accuracy.
FROM SANS
“Our experience with OAG has been truly transformative. The data is not only robust and reliable, but it has also become an essential part of our operations. We use it across forecasting, reporting, and even machine learning projects, and it is now embedded in the daily workflows of more than 100 employees. Its value is so evident that we are constantly exploring new ways to leverage it.”
Mohannad Hammad, Business Intelligence Section Head, Saudi Air Navigation Services
OAG has the most flexible frequency delivery capability in the market. Its fast and easy to use data solutions and APIs ensure flexible integration and enable technology providers to manage and control their own supply of air travel data – which maximizes efficiency, saves money and creates an unrivalled competitive advantage. OAG’s schedules and flight status data solutions have become the number one choice for technology providers, travel management companies and innovators.