Embracing Change in
Ground Handling
When our CEO & Founder Tim Fulton started out on his journey as an entrepreneur, it was as a direct result of his firsthand experience in the ground handling sector. After a four-decades long career in aviation ground support, he knew the industry and its stakeholders were hungry for change.
At the same time, he knew it would be difficult to break the status quo as the industry had been accustomed to one way of operating for decades. Before founding Ramper Innovations, Tim quickly noticed ramp agents’ jobs continued to get more strenuous as they loaded and unloaded planes day after day. The aircraft bellies were getting longer, with more to put in them, and ramp agents increasingly were being given less time and fewer people to get the job done. He was seeing more people getting hurt, and in turn, people quitting as a result of the physically taxing nature of the position.
With these issues in mind, Tim set out to find a solution – and with that, Ramper Innovations was born to transcend barriers in ground handling and provide an accessible, affordable, and effective solution that will transform the industry as a whole.
At Ramper Innovations our revolutionary motorized conveyor TISABAS (stands for Tim Saves Backs) is catalyzing the change the ground handling industry has demanded for years. A compact solution that easily transports baggage and cargo while loading and unloading narrow-bodied aircraft, our technology embodies the change companies and ground support agents have long been missing.
While Tim worked as a ground handling agent, he uncovered a few key issues that proved the industry needed a real, actionable response:
- Injuries in ground support were running rampant
- This, in turn, caused a very high turnover rate – proving costly for companies
- The ramp agents that did stay took a long time to load and unload baggage, causing delays to ensue, not to mention frustration amongst overworked, tired employees
- Overall – there wasn’t a cost effective, portable solution
This is when Tim took the steps to produce transformation, understanding that embracing change is key to starting and maintaining a successful company.
“Everything is fluid. I believe that if companies are unwilling to change, they will not be around for long,” says Tim. “The biggest change I’ve personally embraced was changing from a secure nine to five job to becoming the CEO of a company,” he concludes.
Fast forward to today, and that startup is making a name for itself with TISABAS as a solution to many of today’s biggest problems in ground support. A few core statistics on the technology’s impact include:
- TISABAS will reduce at least one injury per gate per year. The average cost per injury in the USA due to time loss is $122,000.
- TISABAS can reduce a minimum of one agent turnover. It currently costs $8,000 to train a new employee in direct cost.
- Emergency maintenance to repair holes in the aircraft belly is $20,000 a year for the one gate station.
- TISABAS can reduce damaged baggage claims by $100 a month or $1,200 a year.
- All in all: our technology will save airlines a minimum of $151,000 a year, or $12,500 a month, with just under three months ROI.
Simply put: TISABAS is a genuine changemaker. Tim’s goal when he started Ramper Innovations remains his goal today, which is to change the lives of ramp agents by reducing their on-the-job injuries.
“My happiest moments will be when I’m in an airport and am recognized and thanked by a ramp agent as the person who invented TISABAS,” says Tim.
While every aspect of the airline industry has evolved in the past 60 years, belly loading has remained at a standstill until TISABAS. It’s become overwhelmingly clear that the current method of manually loading aircraft results in needless, often debilitating injuries to employees and costs airlines millions of dollars annually. That’s exactly why TISABAS was created.
