Alaska Airlines is getting closer to making AI-powered flight scheduling a reality for its normal operations. The Seattle-based carrier has been testing an optimization tool to determine when it can schedule its flights to appropriately match others and streamline connections.
It comes after the airline suffered a scheduling mishap earlier this year that resulted in losing “all sorts of guests” from a particular route. By only an adjustment by an hour, the carrier said its margins on the route “tanked by double-digits.”
My previously reported that Alaska had struck a partnership with UP.Labs to launch an AI-enabled startup, known as Odysee.
The program leverages AI to optimize real-time operational logistics, which begin with flight scheduling. Odyssey allows Alaska to assess how any schedule changes might affect revenue, profitability, and reliability.
This past spring, the airline pushed back the flight time of its daily frequencies from Redmond Municipal Airport (RDM) to San Francisco International Airport (SFO) by one hour.
Although it may have been viewed as a minor adjustment, the change made the flight arrive at SFO after many of the carrier’s other flights to the East Coast and Southern California had departed, according to Fast Company.
As a result, Alaska’s passenger numbers took a brutal hit.
Kristen Amrine, the carrier’s Vice President of Revenue Management and Network Planning, spoke to Fast Company about how detrimental the decision ended up being.
“The route’s margin tanked by double-digits. We just lost all sorts of guests because it no longer connected.”
This summer, Alaska subsequently positioned the Redmond to San Francisco flight back to its original time, but it realized that there were challenges in efficiently avoiding another such occurrence in the future.
Flight schedules are often complex as they involve the route’s demand, connections, and airport ground staff. Any minor changes to a route could produce satisfactory results, or could be a major blow to a carrier’s profits.
Alaska first announced that it was investigating artificial intelligence to optimize its flight scheduling. Alaska Star Ventures, the airline’s investment arm, was eventually created, along with its partnership with Odysee. The predictive AI tool assists the airline in utilizing its aircraft across its route network.
“We currently have to go and look at each flight that we’re changing individually,” Amrine said, according to Fast Company. “Wiith this product, we’re able to say ‘here’s the schedule I have now, I’m going to try this solution where I change the timings of six flights,’ push a button and it says ‘here’s what the revenue is’. It’s just much better than a human being can do on their own.”
Odysee’s CEO, Steve Casley, reportedly said the AI technology was tested on over 700,000 Alaska flight segments between 2022 and 2023. When tested against flight changes performed by human schedulers, the technology predicted an outcome with an accuracy of 90%.
Casley explained how Odysee reveals potential factors that could be faced when changes to flights occur.
“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. 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 is still in the testing phase with Odysee, but Casley reportedly expects it will be implemented by the first half of next year.
