“Alaska Airlines” reduced flight times and the amount of fuel on 64% of flights

"FlyWise" .. a smart program that predicts weather changes during travel

"FlyWise" provides the location of the flight when you face severe weather.

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With the return of air travel approaching, airlines are preparing to receive large numbers of travelers, at a time when technology companies want to contribute effectively to securing the increasing number of flights.

The US company, Air Space Intelligence, which works in the field of artificial intelligence in “Silicon Oasis”, hopes to make air travel more efficient and safe, while airlines try to recover from a year in which the “Covid-19” pandemic devastated the travel industry.

The company has developed the "FlyWise" program, which provides smart solutions, supported by artificial intelligence, stressing that humans always have the last decision.

The pilot can, through the “FlyWise” program, use the private data on the computer screen, and the program, which was called “Algo” for short, can guess the location of the flight when it encounters severe weather, as well as machine learning, and potential problems. Others, before humans realize them, help airport staff and pilots avoid last-minute changes, and the service is available with necessary advice.

Experience "FlyWise"

Philip Beckendorf, CEO and co-founder of Air Space Intelligence, who came up with the idea for Flywise after visiting a flight control center in the US, found that many of the centers look like accountancy firms in the 1990s.

Employees often relied on paper publications to find out weather forecasts and wind speeds by decoding strings of letters and numbers on a federal Web site.

Beckendorf, a German who used to work for a self-driving car company, wanted to apply the idea of ​​avoiding traffic jams or mis-parked vehicles to planes in flight.

“We have this incredibly dynamic environment where we want to predict where you're going to be in the air?

What does the environment look like?

And how can you improve that?”

He began implementing his idea at the Alaska Airlines Center, in Seattle, for several months, and, with his partners, was able to develop FlyWise.

Alaska Airlines was the fastest to approve the experiment, and in May 2020, the FlyWise program began to be used on all of its continental flights, for a period of six months. During that time, artificial intelligence reduced flight time and fuel quantity on 64% of flights, saving an average of 5.3 minutes per flight, and 480,000 gallons of fuel, which means reducing 4,600 tons of carbon emissions.