As Proven in Heathrow: The Airport Software System Too Important to Fail
What are the largest software systems inside an airport?
Most executives immediately point to baggage handling, security checkpoints, or aircraft turnaround. These are the obvious ones: complex, visible, and headline-making when they fail.
A baggage system breakdown leaves thousands without luggage and dominates the news cycle. A security failure halts an entire terminal and attracts regulators. A delayed turnaround ripples across schedules, costing millions in missed slots and misplaced crews. Even secondary processes like cleaning, fueling, and catering, when disrupted, can cascade into widespread disruption.
It is natural these functions draw executive attention. But there is another operation, less visible yet far larger and more fragile than any of them. An operation that moves across the whole airport, touches every stakeholder, and is growing at a pace none of the others come close to. One that many still underestimate until it is too late: assisted passenger services (also known as PRM — Passengers with Reduced Mobility).
The Hidden Giant Inside Every Hub
Assisted services are now the fastest-growing operation inside airports. In large hubs, requests double every five to seven years. Volumes already exceed pre-pandemic levels, and what once looked like exceptional peak demand is becoming the daily norm.
Unlike baggage or security, assisted services are not confined to a single location or system. They cover the entire passenger journey: curb to check-in, through security, into lounges, through boarding bridges, across transfers, onto arrivals, and finally onto or off the aircraft. They span both indoor and outdoor spaces, public and restricted areas.
Every journey is different. Gate changes, missed connections, flight delays, personal requests for autonomy, urgent medical needs; assisted services must adapt to each in real time. It is a moving target, live across the airport, second by second.
More Complex Than Anything Else
No other airport operation demands so much, from so many, all at once. Assisted services involve airlines, airport operators, ground handlers, subcontractors, regulators, and families. They require constant orchestration of hundreds of agents, wheelchairs, buggies, and airside vehicles across multiple terminals and secure areas.
Turnaround follows a predictable clock. Baggage follows belts. Security follows lanes. Assisted services follow passengers — and passengers do not move to a fixed script.
The consequence: one missed service call can strand a passenger, delay a flight, or trigger a regulatory complaint. At scale, failures become visible to the entire airport community. These are not abstract technical glitches. They are failures measured in stranded people, delayed departures, congested gates, and reputations lost.
Why Systems Keep Failing
Despite its scale, assisted services are still managed with systems that cannot cope. Legacy platforms collapse when requests rise beyond a few thousand per day. Workforce management software, retrofitted for PRM, cannot handle live dispatch across terminals. Newer entrants that appear promising in demos consistently fail under hub conditions, where demand is unpredictable and never stops shifting.
And pen and paper? At hub scale, it is not an alternative. Manual allocation without visibility or accountability is dangerous. Passengers go missing. Flights are delayed. Staff improvise under pressure. The airport loses control.
Equally inadequate are “simple allocation” systems. Assigning jobs in a static sequence may look efficient on a screen, but without the capacity to adapt to live conditions, delays, transfers, resources moving across terminals, such systems collapse quickly. What feels neat in theory becomes chaos in practice.
When fragile or simplistic systems fail, the results are immediate: requests queue unprocessed, dispatch grinds to a halt, agents lose visibility, and passengers are left waiting. Airlines miss slots, connections are lost, and the airport’s most reputation-sensitive operation spins out of control.
For a passenger needing assistance, a five-minute delay feels like an hour. At hub scale, failure strands thousands. These are not glitches, they are full-system collapses with operational, financial, reputational, and human consequences.
Proof That Reliability at Scale Is Possible
Heathrow is the largest assisted service operation in the world. Every terminal. Every airline. Tens of thousands of requests every day.
And it has not failed. For more than 1,000 consecutive days, Ozion has managed up to 10,000 daily requests without a single system breakdown.
This is not a theoretical benchmark. It is real, continuous, and proven at the hardest possible scale. Heathrow demonstrates that assisted services, the most complex airport operation, can be made reliable.
Resilience by Design
Ozion PRM Manager was not adapted from baggage or workforce tools. It was built specifically for assisted services, designed from the ground up to handle operations that follow passengers in motion, across terminals, in real time, without pause.
The design has been tested under maximum pressure, and has never failed. Not once. This is not chance. It is the result of resilience deliberately engineered into the system.
And while Heathrow operates with a single provider, the system was built to coordinate multiple providers when airports require it, keeping passengers, staff, and operations aligned, even in the most complex environments.
“What sets Ozion apart isn’t flashy sales claims, it’s a simple, proven fact: no other system has demonstrated it can deliver true operational resilience at hub scale.”
— William L. Neece, CEO, Ozion Americas
Invisible, Yet Critical Infrastructure
Assisted services may involve a fraction of total passengers, but their disruption spreads across the entire airport. Missed assistance means missed connections, congested gates, delayed aircraft, and angry travelers whose stories echo far beyond the terminal.
Ozion PRM Manager is infrastructure. Like oxygen or a control tower, invisible but indispensable. If it fails, the airport feels it everywhere.
The Leadership Test
Airports that continue with fragile legacy systems, manual workarounds, or unproven replacements are not lowering risk. They are guaranteeing collapse. Airlines that accept blind spots in assisted services expose themselves to complaints, disputes, and costly delays. Providers without the right systems leave their staff firefighting instead of serving passengers.
Hub operations now have a benchmark. The question for every other airport is whether they are prepared to meet it, or wait for the consequences of failure.
A Solid Foundation for the Future
The growth of assisted services is accelerating. The stakes are rising. And the industry cannot afford failure.
Reliability at hub scale is possible. Ozion has already delivered it. Now it is time for airports worldwide to recognize assisted services for what they are: the largest, most complex operation inside an airport and too important to fail.
Ready to see hub-scale reliability in action? Contact our team below today and discover how Ozion PRM Manager can strengthen your most complex operation.
