Alaska Airlines
Assembly Line
Alaska Airlines and UP.Labs launch Odysee, an AI-enabled startup taking a new approach to schedule optimization
One year after announcing their partnership to solve business challenges through innovation, Alaska Airlines and UP.Labs, have officially announced their first new startup, Odysee, at the UP.Summit. Odysee, which launched with $5M in seed funding led by UP.Partners, is focused on lending powerful AI and computing power to inform real-time tradeoff decisions in planning for and managing operational logistics, starting with scheduling. The platform will 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.
Odysee utilizes an operations research-led approach to build flight schedules and rapidly quantify the impacts of schedule changes on revenue, profitability and reliability. The platform can run hundreds of simulations within seconds to provide accurate flight-level insights to stress-test a future schedule. This tool can assess more options and evaluate more variables than the human brain – giving teams the opportunity to make more informed decisions.
AIR COMPANY Raises $69M in Series B to Commercialize Carbon Utilization Technology and Sustainable Aviation Fuels
AIR COMPANY, a carbon conversion technology company, announced it has raised $69M in Series B funding to advance its technology, promote energy security, and drive emissions reductions in hard-to-abate sectors, such as aviation. Avfuel, a leading global supplier of aviation fuel and services, led the round and will be the preferred provider of distribution and logistics, plus environmental attribute tracking and reporting for AIR COMPANY. Additional participants in the round included Lowercarbon Capital, IQT (In-Q-Tel), Alaska Airlines, Connecticut Innovation’s Climate Tech Fund, Duncan Aviation, JSSI, and the owners of Sheltair Aviation, among others. Existing investors Carbon Direct Capital, JetBlue Ventures, and Toyota Ventures also participated in the financing. As part of this investment, Avfuel will join the company’s board of directors.
The new capital will bolster AIR COMPANY’s engineering and R&D capabilities, accelerating the development of its advanced technology to meet increasing demand for clean fuels in both commercial and government sectors. AIR COMPANY is at the forefront of creating scalable sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) produced from carbon dioxide, which seamlessly integrates into existing aircraft and infrastructure. This investment represents a major advancement toward large-scale production of fully formulated, CO2-derived SAF.
Alaska Airlines announces investment in JetZero to propel innovative aircraft technology and design
Alaska Airlines announced an investment in JetZero, a pioneering company developing a new blended-wing body (BWB) aircraft that will provide up to 50% less fuel burn and lower emissions. The investment reflects Alaska’s commitment to advance new technology that will benefit the future of aviation, including those that enable the airlines’ path to net zero carbon emissions. Alaska invested as part of JetZero’s Series A last year and is the first airline to do so.
The investment, which includes options for future aircraft orders, was made through Alaska Star Ventures (ASV), the airline’s investment arm whose purpose is to influence the future of the aviation industry. ASV is focused on identifying and enabling the technologies that can help Alaska reach its ambitious goal of net zero carbon emissions by 2040. This initiative is one piece of Alaska’s comprehensive sustainability strategy along with operational efficiency, fleet renewal, sustainable aviation fuel, waste reduction, and electrified aircraft.
AI: how it’s delivering sharper route planning
Creating a route requires a dispatcher to answer a host of questions such as: “What is the wind today?”, “What is the best altitude for this flight?” and “Is there any military training?” Before the Flyways software, the 100 or so dispatchers at the NOC had to find answers to these questions by visiting multiple websites. These included FAA websites designed specifically for dispatchers, but that information was available only as strings of text that were hard to read.
Having decided to focus on the aviation industry, the team started spending an obscene amount of time at the NOC in an effort to understand how dispatching works and to create a user-friendly product — one that a real dispatcher could seamlessly operate when under pressure. Alaska Airlines’ employees would joke that the team was basically camping in their operations center with sleeping bags, Buckendorf says.
Flyways improves itself further by learning from a human dispatcher’s acceptance or rejection of its recommendations. When the dispatcher dismisses a suggestion, Flyways asks why: Was it because of the weather? Was the route putting an airplane uncomfortably close to somewhere it shouldn’t be? The idea is that Flyways learns from those decisions and evolves — though certain data points need to be filtered out so that the software does not simply emulate human dispatchers’ choices, stifling innovation.