This airline is testing out AI to schedule flights

After a daily flight route change lost it customers, one U.S.-based airliner is turning to artificial intelligence to figure out flight schedules.

Alaska Airlines (ALK+2.77%) is testing a predictive AI-powered schedule optimization tool to determine when to schedule its planes, the company said in October. The tool was developed by Odysee, the first startup out of a partnership between Alaska Airlines’ investment arm, Alaska Star Ventures, and tech incubator UP.Labs.

Odysee’s platform will help the airline “ensure the best use of each aircraft asset and the interconnections between them, empowering teams to more effectively optimize one of the most complex areas of an airline’s business,” Alaska Airlines said.

The tool can run hundreds of simulations in seconds, the airline said, allowing for “accurate flight-level insights to stress-test a future schedule.”

Data from more than 700,000 Alaska Airlines flight segments from 2022 and 2023 was used to train the platform, Fast Company reported. Odysee’s tool performed with 90% accuracy when tested against flight changes made by humans, the startup’s chief executive, Steve Casley, told Fast Company.

“When a scheduler, let’s say, realizes there are three [flights] going into a city that has two gates [and] they need to move one of those flights by an hour, now they’re doing it intuitively,” Casley told Fast Company. “What this product will do is, when they move that flight, it will show them several things: It will simulate the flow of that schedule for that [airplane] and determine if you’re impacting the potential for delay and predict the revenue.”

Alaska Airlines expects to implement the tool in the first half of next year, Casley said.

In September, the airliner announced it had officially acquired Hawaiian Airlines in a $1.9 billion merger — the largest of U.S. carriers in almost a decade.