Traditionally the air transport community has had rigid standards for inter-system communications pinned to the underlying centralized network. However with advent of IP communications over the Internet fast becoming the de facto standards for business to business transactions and as the community begins to embrace this new technology, the absence of well defined standards restricts the flexibility and scalability of the solution.

Many air transport companies, airlines and airports are having to establish bilateral or multilateral mechanisms to connect their systems over IP networks and increasingly rely on a small number of hubs to gateway between their systems. The end result being a different number of solutions to the same problem but each achieved independently.

Work is being carried out in .aero to develop a framework for intra-industry communications using DNS as means to simplify addressing in IP network environment. Airlines in particular will benefit from this work, for example while most airlines have moved to an IP, some still rely on legacy networks. From a community perspective, development or standardization of messaging formats, naming schemes or communication mechanisms taking advantage of the Internet should also provide for transition from and translation to legacy messaging.

At the same time, this level of future planning should avoid the
expensive "two transitions" trap of simply migrating old formats and ways of doing things to the
new environment, only to be faced with a later redesign to take advantage of the other special properties
and strengths of the Internet.

.aero's approach to the deployment of this new technology and its related standards will not only help close the technology gap that exists in some areas between small and big airlines and airports -  to the  benefit of the community as a whole but will do so by  reducing implementation costs and enhancing operational effectiveness.