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 befo...