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The Diggintravel PodcastAuthor: Iztok Franko
Success stories told by the digital leaders. At best youll get inspired to do great digital work. At worst youll learn about new interesting people from airline, travel, digital and experimentation world. Narrated by Iztok Franko, founder of Diggintravel.com and a digital enthusiast. Language: en Genres: Aviation, Business, Leisure, Marketing Contact email: Get it Feed URL: Get it iTunes ID: Get it |
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Digital Twins Part II: How Airlines and Airports Can Build One in Practice
Episode 82
Tuesday, 6 October, 2026
In the second episode of our Airline Digital Innovation Series, we continue exploring digital twins for airlines and airports. But this time, we move from the big idea to a much more practical question: How do you actually build one? After our first conversation about digital twins, I received several versions of the same feedback. The concept sounds exciting, but creating a realistic digital version of an airport must require a huge amount of data, complex integrations and a long technology project. My guest, Sebastian Huch, CTO of Autonoma, explains why this does not necessarily need to be the case. Sebastian comes from an academic, data science and engineering background. Before building digital twins for aviation, he worked with autonomous vehicles and was part of the team that won the first Indy Autonomous Challenge. In our conversation, Sebastian explains how an initial digital-twin proof of concept can be built in only a couple of weeks using publicly available data. From there, airlines and airports can gradually connect their own operational systems, add more data sources and develop the pilot into a more realistic, dynamic and predictive operational model. We also explore two very different examples. At Augusta Regional Airport, digital twins help teams prepare for the huge and unpredictable traffic surge during Masters week. At the other end of the scale, Autonoma independently modelled Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport to test whether its approach could scale to the world’s busiest passenger airport. Finally, we look further into the future and discuss how AI agents could continuously monitor conditions, recognize emerging problems, create simulations and test possible responses before an operator even asks. Throughout the conversation, one principle remains important: digital twins and AI should expand what experienced operational teams can see and test, while the final decision stays with the human. RESOURCES: Read the companion article explaining how airlines and airports can build their first digital-twin pilot, add operational data and gradually develop it into a live predictive model: https://diggintravel.com/build-digital-twins-airlines-airports/
