Alaska Airlines Partners with Airspace Intelligence to Optimize Air Traffic Flow Through AI and Machine Learning

The commitment to a continued partnership comes after an initial six-month trial program, during which Alaska’s dispatchers used the new AI-powered flight prediction information to help them plan, monitor, and make recommendations for rerouting flights to avoid issues like congested airspace and bad weather. Flyways found an opportunity to reduce miles and fuel use for 64 percent of mainline flights, of which dispatchers evaluated and accepted 32 percent of the Flyways recommendations.

“Artificial intelligence and machine learning are among the top drivers of technology today and, for the first time, have been applied to the airline flight planning environment,” says Pasha Saleh, flight operations strategy and innovation director for Alaska Airlines. “Alaska’s use of Flyways in just six months, even with significantly depressed flying due to COVID-19, enabled us to save 480,000 gallons of fuel and avoid 4,600 tons of carbon emissions.”

The Challenge of Flight Route Planning

Safely planning the most efficient route for each flight is an operation performed by dispatchers, who work in the airline’s Network Operations Center. Dispatchers work with pilots to ensure the safe routing and operation of a flight. When planning a route from origin to destination, dispatchers consider the current and predicted weather, reported air turbulence, aircraft performance, safety policies, air-traffic-control compliance and traffic volume. It is an incredibly complex workflow. 

Existing airline computer systems don’t have the ability to compile all of the various information and evolving conditions into one cohesive source or map. Those systems do not take other flight traffic into account, give limited insights into future conditions, and are without predictive capabilities.

The Flyways AI Platform

Flyways AI is a 4D mapping, predictive and recommendation platform for commercial air operations that relies on machine learning and artificial intelligence.

The system autonomously evaluates the operational safety, ATC compliance, and efficiency of an airline’s planned and active flights. When it finds a better route around turbulence or a more efficient route, it provides actionable recommendations to flight dispatchers. The dispatcher then decides whether to accept and implement the recommended solution. Dispatchers always make the final call, in accordance with existing FAA protocols.

The system looks at all scheduled and active flights across the US, scanning air traffic systemically rather than focusing on single flights. It treats air traffic more like the way mapping applications look at ground traffic—as a dynamic and constantly changing ecosystem of moving objects.

By applying machine learning, Airspace Intelligence created prediction models of the U.S. air space that allow the platform to predict how weather, traffic and other constraints impact flights. This kind of predictive modeling allows Flyways to provide its airlines partners with the ability to  “look into the future,” as far as eight-plus hours ahead. The system helps the operational decision-makers streamline traffic flow, thereby reducing fuel burn and Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Emissions. This supports Alaska’s path to reducing carbon emissions and reduces fuel cost.

In addition, Flyways offers the user a powerful, streamlined experience, presented as a dynamic and coherent 4D map that is easy to understand. 

“Our mission is to help our customers improve the predictability of their highly complex and dynamically changing flight operations in the United States National Airspace System (NAS),” says Buckendorf. “We do this by applying the latest advances in artificial intelligence. Our AI platform gives enhanced levels of predictive situational awareness, to augment the quality, speed and precision of human decision-makers.”

Flyways is part of Alaska Airlines’ investment in efficient and innovated technologies to reduce its climate impact and meet the airline’s goal of net zero carbon emissions by 2040. A foundational step in this journey is using technology to optimize flight routes for emission savings. Learn more about Alaska Airlines climate goals at blog.alaskaair.com.

Alaska Airlines and its regional partners serve more than 120 destinations across the United States and to Mexico, Canada and Costa Rica.

Airspace Intelligence is a software-first aerospace company based in Silicon Valley that supports customers with the worlds’ most complex air operations and missions.