Dispatchers in Alaska Airlines’ Network Operations Center near the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport.
Joe Nicholson/Alaska Airlines
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Joe Nicholson/Alaska Airlines
On a typical day, Alaska Airlines operates roughly 1,500 flights, most of them guided by a team of dispatchers on the sixth floor of an office building near the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport known as “The Hub.”
The dispatchers sit in a big open room, surrounded by as many as five flatscreen monitors that display real-time information on air traffic, weather, upper-level wind patterns, and more.
It’s a lot to process. But these dispatchers are getting some help from a software tool called Flyways AI.
“It ingests all that information,” said Alek Mead, a manager in Alaska’s Network Operations Center, “and it really kind of puts us all together in a nice little package for the dispatcher to look at, take some options, maybe play around with some different ideas, and then pick the most efficient and the safest route.”
When Alaska wanted to optimize its operations, it turned to a small startup called Air Space Intelligence. Now the Federal Aviation Administration has tapped the same company to carry out a major reboot of the entire U.S. airspace.
The FAA wants to use technology — including artificial intelligence — to make the nation’s airspace more efficient. And Flyways offers a glimpse of how that might look in practice.
Alaska was the first airline to start using the Flyways system back in 2021 to do things that would be challenging, if not impossible, for a human dispatcher working alone.
“It doesn’t decide the route or waypoints that a dispatcher uses to get an airplane from A to B, but it does help provide suggestions that might be more efficient,” explained Captain Bret Peyton, the managing director of Alaska’s network operations control. “That’s where Flyways is really excelling for us.”
Alaska says it’s saving tens of thousands of hours in the air and roughly a million gallons of fuel per year because of Flyways.
The system works by basically crunching data on air traffic, wind, weather and other factors to anticipate what is going to happen during flight before it does.
Phillip Buckendorf, the CEO and co-founder of Air Space Intelligence, speaking at a conference in Washington, D.C. earlier this year.
Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images
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Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images
“It’s actually a really fundamental change, a massive behavior change,” said Phillip Buckendorf, the co-founder and CEO of Air Space Intelligence, the company that built Flyways, in an interview on the podcast Crossing the Valley last year.
Buckendorf says his company worked closely with Alaska to build Flyways from the ground up. The company has since expanded to work with Delta Air Lines and United Airlines, as well as the U.S. Army and Air Force.
“One of the hardest things is we’re dealing with users that have basically made decisions against static displays for like 10, 20 years of their career. And so now they basically make a decision against a predictive picture,” Buckendorf said.
Federal regulators are betting that predictive analytics can make the entire U.S. airspace work better, too.
“I think we’ve got a real opportunity to do something transformational with AI,” said Bryan Bedford, the head of the Federal Aviation Administration, at an industry conference in May.
Bedford says the U.S. airspace is safe today because air traffic controllers make sure planes are separated from each other at every stage of their journey. But he says the current system is not as efficient as it could be.
“What we’re seeing is a system that is woefully unorganized,” Bedford said. “We don’t have in any of our facilities the ability to see the entire national airspace picture in a unified way.”
Bedford says predictive analytics can help prevent bottlenecks and congestion before they happen, with relatively small adjustments to schedules and routes.
The FAA is so convinced that it recently announced an $875 million dollar contract with Air Space Intelligence to modernize the nation’s airspace. The company is tasked with building what the agency is calling the SMART system, short for Strategic Management of Airspace, Routes, and Trajectories.
It’s part of the Trump administration’s ambitious push to deliver a Brand New Air Traffic Control System. FAA officials say the goal is to help air traffic controllers, not replace them.
But skeptics wonder if the technology can scale up from helping airline dispatchers to optimizing the entire U.S. airspace, which is the busiest and most complex in the world.
Bret Peyton at Alaska Airlines says dispatchers there were skeptical, too.
“It took a while for us to convince the dispatch group that it is what we say it is, which is a decision making aid, and not a tool that’s going to run rogue and make weird decisions for the dispatcher,” Peyton said. “And it happened relatively quickly once dispatchers saw their true results that were pretty immediate.”
KNKX’s Izzy Ross contributed reporting from Seattle.
