Alaska Airlines Taps New Flight Planning Software to Avoid Costly Delays
Photo Credit: Alaska Airlines N548AS plane taking off from Los Angeles Airport. The carrier is using artificial intelligence from a startup called Flyways to enhance the efficiency of its flight operations strategy. Flickr / Creative Commons / Marco Verch
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.
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