![]() ![]() But what the dispatchers don’t factor into their calculus is the actual FAA-filed flight plan of every other aircraft planning to be in the sky that day and how all those planes might interact, leading to cascading congestion along the flight route. In addition, dispatchers may consider current airport congestion levels, as well as their own intuition, based on hard-earned experience, about how crowded runways and landing approaches will likely be at the scheduled departure and arrival times. Finding this information often requires the dispatcher to flip back and forth between a dozen different government, private weather forecasting, airport, and internal airline databases. To do this, the dispatchers take into account weather and wind forecasts, as well as military and other airspace restrictions, and sometimes reports of turbulence provided by pilots who have already flown that same route earlier in the day. But there are many different possible routes between waypoints and it is up to the dispatchers to determine which of these skyways the plane will travel to reach its destination. ![]() These waypoints form what are essentially highways in the sky. Instead, they zig-zag in the general direction of their destination, dog-legging between a series of navigational waypoints. don’t fly a straightline path between takeoff and landing. commercial aviation that many in the aviation sector as well as some environmentalists and politicians have long-sought: an “open skies” air traffic system (technically called “trajectory-based operations”) that will allow planes to fly the most direct route to their destination, doing away with the system of pre-defined waypoints. What’s more, the software, which was created by a company called Airspace Intelligence, could help pave the way for a revolution in U.S. Increasing use of such systems could make a big impact on the aviation sector’s carbon dioxide emissions and lead to fewer flight delays. While Alaska Airlines is the first commercial carrier to use this software for flight dispatching, it’s unlikely to be the last. ![]() “This is as game changing for aviation as Google Maps and Waze has been for driving,” says Pasha Saleh, Alaska’s director of flight operations. Now it is rolling out the system, called Flyways, to help dispatch all of its flights in the lower 48, making Alaska the first airline to use this kind of technology so extensively. ![]() For the past year, some of those dispatchers have had help from an adept new colleague: an artificial intelligence system created by a small Silicon Valley startup that can often make better predictions about variables such as weather and air traffic than even experienced human flight planners.ĭuring a trial of the software, the airline achieved big savings in jet fuel and lower carbon dioxide emissions, as well as seeing improvements in its on-time performance and reliability. Dispatchers are licensed by the FAA and share legal responsibility for an aircraft’s safety along with its pilots. But its journey really began several hours earlier, about a mile away from the airport, on the sixth floor of Alaska Airlines’ new steel and glass headquarters building, known as “The Hub.” That’s where flight dispatchers working for the airline plan flights, deciding on the precise route each aircraft will fly to reach its destination. The flight pushed back from the gate five minutes ahead of its 6:10 a.m. One morning last week, Alaska Airlines flight 1380 thundered down the runway of the Seattle-Tacoma Airport and ascended into clear blue skies, bound for San Diego. ![]()
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