How Alaska Airlines used AI to save over 1.2 million gallons of jet fuel
Alaska Airlines uses Air Space Intelligence’s AI technology to help plan flight routes.
Coordinating airline flights seems easy on paper. Nearly all travel routes are planned months in advance, and they’re designed to ensure there aren’t too many aircraft flying at one time. But frequent airline delays show that this seemingly simple task can become mind-bogglingly complex.
One out of every five flights in the US is delayed by at least 15 minutes. “The fundamental problem is that when a human being sits down to plan a flight, they only have information about their one flight,” Pasha Saleh, the head of corporate development at Alaska Airlines, said.
To solve that, Alaska Airlines partnered with an AI startup called Air Space Intelligence, the creator of the Flyways AI Platform, which uses artificial intelligence to suggest optimal flight routes. The partnership started three years ago and was renewed in August. Now, half the flight plans reviewed by Alaska Airlines’ dispatchers include a plan suggested by Flyways.
Pasha Saleh, the head of corporate development at Alaska Airlines.
Situation analysis: What problem was the company trying to solve?
All major airline flights are logged with the Federal Aviation Administration and generally filed at least several hours ahead of time. Most commercial passenger flights follow common routes flown on a schedule.
In theory, that means air traffic is predictable. But the reality in the air is often more hectic. Saleh said that air-traffic control is “often very tactical, not strategic.”
That leads to last-minute diversions and delays that inconvenience passengers and cost Alaska money as pilots, crews, and planes sit idle.
“Airplanes are expensive assets, and you only make money when they’re flying,” Saleh said.
Key staff and partners
Alaska Airlines and ASI worked in partnership from the beginning of the partnership.
Saleh met Phillip Buckendorf, the CEO of Air Space Intelligence, in 2018. Buckendorf wanted to use AI to route self-driving cars. Saleh wondered whether the idea could be applied to airlines and invited Buckendorf to visit Alaska Airlines’ operations center.
“He looked at those screens expecting to see something out of ‘Star Trek.’ Instead, he saw something one generation removed from IBM DOS,” Saleh said, referring to an operating system that was discontinued over 20 years ago. “Pretty much on the spot, he decided to pivot to airlines.”
The resulting product, Flyways, was adopted by Alaska Airlines in 2021.
While Air Space Intelligence developed the Flyways AI Platform, it did so in close cooperation with the airline’s stakeholders.
“Airlines are very unionized environments, so we wanted to make sure this wasn’t seen as a threat to dispatchers,” Saleh said. Alaska Airlines used dispatcher feedback to hone Flyways.
Flyways now works as an assistant to the airline’s dispatchers, who see its options presented when creating a flight plan.
AI in action
The partnership between Alaska Airlines and Air Space Intelligence began with a learning period for both organizations.
ASI’s staff shadowed the airline’s dispatchers to learn how they worked, while Alaska Airlines learned more about how a machine-learning algorithm could be used to route traffic. Saleh said ASI spent about 1 ½ years developing the first version of the Flyways AI Platform.
Flyways trains its AI algorithm on historical flight data. At its most basic level, this includes information like a flight’s scheduled departure and arrival, actual departure and arrival, and route.
However, Flyways also ingests data on less obvious variables, like restricted military airspace (including temporary restrictions, like those surrounding Air Force One) and wind speeds at cruising altitude. Even events like the Super Bowl, which causes a surge in demand and leads to airspace restrictions around the event, are considered.
Saleh said Flyways connects to multiple sources of information to acquire this data and automatically ingests it through application programming interfaces. Flyways then runs its AI model to determine the suggested route.
“Suggested” is a keyword: While Flyways uses AI to predict the best route, it’s not an automated or agentic system and doesn’t claim the reasoning capabilities of generative-AI services like ChatGPT.
Dispatchers see Flyways’ flight plans as an option in the software interface they use to plan a flight, but a plan isn’t put into use until a human dispatcher approves it.
Did it work, and how did leaders know?
Alaska Airlines’ dispatchers accept 23% of Flyways’ recommendations. While that might seem low, those accepted routes helped reduce Alaska Airlines’ fuel consumption by more than 1.2 million gallons in 2023, according to the airline’s annual sustainability report.
Reduced fuel consumption is necessary if Alaska is to reach its goal of becoming the most-fuel-efficient airline by 2025. The airline also ranks well on delays: It was the No. 2 most-on-time US airline in 2023, with some of the fewest cancellations.
Meanwhile, ASI has grown its head count from a handful of engineers to 110 employees across offices in Boston, Denver, Poland, and Washington, DC. In addition to its partnership with Alaska, the company has contracts with the US Air Force and received $34 million in Series B funding in December from Andreessen Horowitz.
