As of the end of June, Alaska had 162 Boeing 737 Next Generation passenger aircraft in its fleet, some seen here at its heavily renovated N Gates at SeaTac airport in August 2023. Its 737-900ERs are still youthful, though Pieper anticipates its older 737s will begin drawing down in the second half of the decade. Its 737-800s will be a good source of feedstock for converted freighters, he said, while the oldest aircraft, the 737-700s and original 737-900s, including the first built, will begin to sunset over the next five years.

Alaska Airlines startup Odysee taps AI to build better schedules

With Hawaiian and its widebodies in hand, Alaska will give AI tools the opportunity to optimize the new network.

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Release Date
October 8, 2024
Alaska Airlines startup Odysee taps AI to build better schedules

The potential for optimization in a network airline schedule is practically infinite. The time available to network planning and scheduling analysts is not. This fundamental discrepancy is what Alaska Airlines and UP.Labs aim to address through Odysee, a startup revealed last week at the 2024 UP.Summit in Bentonville, Arkansas and officially launched on Oct. 8 at the World Aviation Festival in Amsterdam.

Alaska and UP.Labs, an extension of the venture capital firm UP.Partners, announced their collaboration on an “airline venture lab” at last year’s UP.Summit in Dallas. As previously reported by The Air Current, the partners aim to launch a total of six startups in the space of three years, all aimed at solving strategic challenges for Alaska while simultaneously developing products that can be profitably sold to the broader industry.

Related: Alaska Airlines embarks on an experiment in near-term innovation

Odysee is the first of these startups, backed by $5 million in seed funding led by UP.Partners. Its core product is an airline schedule simulation and optimization tool with revenue prediction, allowing analysts to quantify the impacts of proposed schedule changes and stress test the new schedule through simulation analysis. Powered by artificial intelligence, the tool enables them to assess more options and evaluate more variables than they could manually, increasing the efficiency and confidence of their trade-off analyses.

“What this really enables us to do is to go a level down and with the click of a button solve a question: ‘Which flight is better at this time?’” said Kirsten Amrine, Alaska’s VP of revenue management and network planning, in an interview with TAC. “It may have previously taken us half an hour to sort that out; now we can run a scenario and within a minute we have a solution back. And so it makes a lot of these trade-off decisions more worthwhile to dig into, whereas before it just wasn’t worth it.”

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