Alaska Airlines Taps New Flight Planning Software to Avoid Costly Delays
Skift Take
Until now, artificial intelligence has mostly been hype. But AI is starting to save travel companies real money by making smarter predictions about events that impact operations.
Next-gen software is redrawing the routes planes fly between airports, avoiding traffic jams in the sky and saving Alaska Airlines millions of dollars.
"We're getting an outsized benefit right now because we're the only airline that's using the software," said Pasha Saleh, flight operations strategy and innovation director for Alaska Airlines. "That means we get to design these bespoke routes for ourselves while everyone else is essentially relegated to the traditional paths that human dispatchers come up with unaided."
In the past, when a Los Angeles-bound Alaska Airlines plane flew out of Anchorage, the carrier padded the flight schedule to include extra time in case of surprise delays. Yet in recent months Alaska has trialed a new route-mapping software from the startup Airspace Intelligence. The software suggests paths in the sky that are tailored to real-time weather and traffic and may be more desirable. Passengers may soon see arrival times are more accurate.
Experts predict that flight dispatching at airlines worldwide will improve with the help of powerful number-crunching software that uses artificial intelligence, or AI.
Today, the typical airline flight dispatcher essentially plans the route that an aircraft will take between airports by doing a bit of math, picturing in their head what storm data on radar might mean for a flight's trajectory — while using route maps that planes have flown
