Does aviation industry use Data analytics? Which tools must be used; knowing the fact that a B-787 produces half a TB of data per flight.

The data driven approach will always drive an organization in many ways. For e.g. Sales team uses to drive the revenue, Finance for understanding the current stand in the market and aware the management e.tc. irrespective to in industry (Aviation, IT, Pharma etc.) .Moreover the next era is going to be for CLOUD and I always recommend a cloud base data Analytics i.e Salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics or SAP.

I did read the Etihad Airways do use BI, anyways, I am really looking to build a bridge between Aviation and Business Intelligence.

Not many company's who involved in aviation industry use data analytics and data information. it's very bad, because it's most important to use flight data information for analysed and make statistic and right designs to make aviation more safety!