CASE STUDY
Cathay Accelerates Data-Driven Operational Excellence with Cirium
Cirium’s data ensures that improvements are calibrated against industry best practices and provides a reference point across key operations performance domains.
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Cathay comprises Cathay Pacific, a premium full-service airline and founding member of the oneworld global alliance; Cathay Cargo, the Group’s cargo division; HK Express, the Group’s low-cost carrier; and Cathay Lifestyle. As at 30 June 2026, Cathay operated 235 passenger and cargo aircraft serving more than 100 passenger destinations and over 40 freighter destinations worldwide. In the first half of 2026, Cathay carried more than 20 million passengers and around 869,000 tonnes of cargo.
As Cathay continues to strengthen its global network and customer experience, aviation data and analytics are playing an increasingly important role in enhancing operational performance, building resilience, and supporting its ambition to become its customers’ most loved service brand.
Interview responses from Walter Li, General Manager Integrated Operations at Cathay.
Walter Li
General Manager Integrated Operations
Cathay
What is Cathay’s vision for operational excellence?
Our vision is to become our customers’ most loved service brand, guided by our purpose to move people forward in life and our core values of being Thoughtful, Progressive and Can-do. As a major driver of customer satisfaction and one of our areas of leadership, operational excellence is fundamental to delivering this vision.
We are therefore committed to driving innovation and making improvements at the heart of our integrated operations, where it matters most to our customers.
What challenges was Cathay facing in achieving operational excellence?
Our operating environment presents unique challenges. Hong Kong’s geographic position exposes us to significant weather disruptions – particularly typhoons that can shut down Hong Kong International Airport for extended periods. Our home hub has also undergone a major transformation with the addition of a third runway in 2024 and the reopening of the new Terminal 2 for operations in May 2026.
In addition, we operate in one of the most complex airspace environments in the region. The Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, home to seven major airports in proximity, presents its own unique challenges in terms of airspace management amidst rapidly growing traffic demand in the region.
Internally, we recognized the need to move from experience-based decision-making to an optimized, data-driven approach supported by integrated analytics and industry insights.
This required access to high-quality, comprehensive industry data that we could not generate on our own.
How is Cathay leveraging Cirium’s aviation data and analytics to address these challenges?
Through Cirium Sky Warehouse, we access comprehensive global flight data, such as schedules, OOOI times, flight status and aircraft movements, which enable three core capabilities.
Competitive positioning: Our Operations Performance & Analytics team systematically compares Cathay’s on-time performance with the wider industry in Asia-Pacific and globally, identifying performance gaps and potential drivers.
Operational intelligence: Analyzing how other airlines operate similar routes helps us better understand constraints, identify best practices, and derive improvement opportunities around network design choices and performance bottlenecks.
Continuous improvement: Cirium’s data feeds into our own performance dashboards and analyses to derive actionable strategic insights.
Combining detailed internal operational data with external industry insights enables a holistic view of our competitive position to continuously improve performance.
What specific improvements does Cathay plan to achieve through data-driven strategies?
Within Cathay, we have developed a comprehensive data-driven operations strategy that benefits from a broad range of operational data.
The suite of innovations includes:
- A schedule simulation tool that models trade-offs across various schedule versions to understand performance and disruption risk to the customer up to 12 months ahead. Cirium’s schedule can provide external context for calibrating these simulations.
- A range of optimizers balancing maintenance placements with operational resilience and optimizing tail-assignment ahead of the operation to achieve maximum schedule robustness and minimize disruptions and their potential impact to our customers.
- A disruption recovery optimizer which helped Cathay Pacific reduce by 80% the decision time during Super Typhoon Ragasa last year, having enabled much faster rebooking of thousands of customer journeys and a quicker return to normal operations compared with previous years.
- Integrated capabilities for all the operations delivery teams to help improve real-time situational awareness, to mitigate risks before they occur with predictive alerts, and to leverage AI to streamline decision efficiency.
These tools, with the intelligent use of data, shall enable us to redesign our operating model with cohesive and holistic planning and delivery of our operations.
Cirium’s data ensures that improvements are calibrated against industry best practices and provides a reference point across key operations performance domains, helping to inform how we compare in each specific area and where additional focus is needed.
How has Cathay adapted its operations to address current challenges and disruptions in the aviation industry?
Throughout the past few years, we have engaged in a large transformation program and built a strong foundation for operational excellence. A key part of this foundation is our Integrated Operations department, which provides end-to-end oversight from assessing initial schedule metrics through to optimized operations delivery. Understanding the data we have is crucial for the entire process.
The planning teams as well as the delivery teams at our Integrated Operations Centre (IOC), which steers our operations and supports our customers on the day, are only as effective as the information they have to support their mission. Therefore, putting data at the centre of our operation with tailored dashboards, innovative tools and modern video walls, all connected through integrated data spanning across the planning and delivery horizons is a key success factor.
What motivated Cathay to choose Cirium as its data analytics partner?
We evaluated the market thoroughly and Cirium stood out for two reasons: data quality and data scope.
On quality, we ran a structured proof of concept in early 2026, testing Cirium Sky Warehouse data against our own operational records. Cirium’s flight status data – OOOI times, schedule information and completion factors – met the accuracy standards we required.
On scope, Cirium offers the broadest global coverage available, sourced from over 2,000 feeds including direct operational data and ADS-B positional data.
The combination of proven quality and comprehensive coverage made Cirium the clear choice.
How would you describe Cathay’s engagement with Cirium?
Our engagement has been collaborative and progressive – reflecting our own values. Starting with exploratory discussions in mid-2025, we moved to a formal proof of concept in January 2026 to test data quality, connectivity and analytical potential.
Following a successful evaluation, we expanded discussions beyond data supply to include brainstorming on predictive analytics, situational awareness and future use cases.
Cirium’s willingness to engage at a technical level with our analytics team has created a foundation for genuine partnership, going well beyond a typical vendor relationship.
What are the future plans and goals for using data to drive operational excellence?
Our ambition is to achieve a leadership position in operational excellence, driven by data, nnovation, and process improvements.
In the near term, we are integrating Cirium’s data into our analytics ecosystem across on-time performance, schedule stability and operational resilience, embedded into our regular operations steering forums.
In the longer term, we see significant potential in combining Cirium’s global data with our simulation and optimization tools – for example, informing schedule scenarios.
Our goal is that every operational decision at Cathay, from schedule design to disruption recovery, is informed by the best available data, both internal and external. This is how we deliver on our promise to move people forward in life.
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