Airline Operations Systems in Focus: Insights from the T2RL Market Report 2026

Hello and welcome to T2RL Talks where we talk about everything airline technology. I'm Amanda Campbell and I'm head of research here at T2RL and I'm filling in on today's podcast as host because our usual host Ian Tannikliffe is blissfully on leave this week and on today's call we're going to be talking about airline operations and we have a few special guests in the as studio today we have got Bert Craven who's deputy CEO of T2RL who's joined by John Fitt Kalski who's VP of Digital at SeaBree airline strategy group in ClearTage who's VP at SeaBree as well so lovely to see you all. Thank you for having us. As I mentioned today we're going to be talking about operations technology and the the impetus for it is that we're in the process of publishing and even by the time you're listening to this podcast we may have already published an latest report on airline operations technology and that report was co-authored by the team here at SeaBree and so for listeners who don't know anything about SeaBree I'm going to kick start the proceedings by asking John to just give us a brief introduction about SeaBree and what you guys do. Sure so SeaBree has a number of companies underneath its umbrella both Claire and I are from SeaBree airline strategy group and there's about a number of us about 50 of us that are working in the industry that have decades of experience working across probably three different groups between strategy commercial and operations so Claire and I both come from the operations domain and I have also crossover into technology and others but our group basically comprises of you know if you think of the airline industry you buy an aircraft you figure out what type of aircraft how to outfit it down to what routes to schedule and how often and where whatnot so we go from an advisory role that helps inform airlines and OEMs on how to look at how to market the aircraft that they're going to fly all the way through day of operations in recovery and so the day of operations planning scheduling preparing assignment all of that type of capability that we're going to talk about in the report is really the domain that Claire and I specialize in and we work with your team that are a T2RL to round out this year's research fantastic and Claire can you tell us a little bit more about the report sort of what was the scope of the of the report and what did it sit out to achieve so this report is a refresh look of a 2024 report that seabrey ASG worked on with T2RL and we really go out there and look at all of the different technology providers in the market who are offering services to help airlines operate and so that could be all the way from scheduling through planning through day of operations through recovery and continuous improvement so we went out and researched the information that was publicly available we did some also one-on-one conversations with specific vendors to see you know what they were offering that had changed in the past two years and then we go in and T2RL has a database where you're constantly scanning and looking to see you know press releases and think public information about which airlines are using which software so it gives airlines who are looking to go out shopping for software so to speak of you into what's available who the market leaders are and sort of you know our opinion about where the market is heading so it's it's an opinion piece but it also has facts based on public information of of what's out there and who's using what although we don't we don't name names for airlines we just give percentages in the report super fantastic so it's a great compliment to it to watch T2RL our old rib already report on and so yeah two years since last report it's a long time and yet it's not can you explain for us a little bit John about what's changed in the last two years sure you know a lot of the the brand names that were there two years ago have either changed names acquired new market entrance and whatnot you know the market is fairly expansive especially if you you start talking about the startups that you see at a number of these conferences but we really focus our research on probably the top 100-plus or minus and you know big big names have been acquired in or or divested or emerged in and whatnot Jeppison is is one of the ones that stick out in my mind you know last year Boeing's divested them to Toma Bravo Cedar made a number of acquisitions TA connections others sky-wise just recently even though they had NavBlue as part of the Airbus family of companies sky-wise in that blue are a little bit more aligned so there's a lot of that activity I think that happens on a regular cadence but it seems like it was a lot more frequent in bigger moves in the last few years than maybe the previous cycle as it were AI is the elephant in the room whether or not folks are are materially doing something to do something more than marketing or or faster time to market in terms of developed capabilities are are are fairly known in universal consistent across pretty much all industries as well as ours but there are a number of companies talking about completely replatforming systems that they have done I think I BS announced something Jeppison for flight just announced something yesterday called airflow so there's a lot of activity around there in terms of how can I develop something more quickly or contemporary but I think not only what has changed but what is constant are still the core operational challenges those are the delays the cancellations airborne holding civil conflicts all the weather those are all decades old constraints that are still needing to be solved for I think what is changing more is the pace of new capabilities being brought to market in the airlines ability to digest that or not which is interesting as well okay super so I guess what we're seeing is consolidation how we're seeing a lot of hype and talk about AI but am I right in understanding that not a lot of new capabilities have been brought on board or that we have seen a lot of innovation of the last two years that have resulted in concrete examples of airlines doing things differently it's an interesting question I'll go first and then lateral to Claire and Burt you know it's different in different pockets my view is like the airport turnaround space has had rapid acceleration of capabilities being brought whether or not it's you know computer vision by companies like Synaptic and Messiah which are basically computer vision isn't new it's 10 plus years old as a technology but the application of it to fill in blanks and voids of data that didn't exist were what is happening during the turnaround process how do I look at for safety issues or all of these events and create now not only data capture but data insights around those events and so what has been sort of hyped and talked about for decades about creating digital twins in the IT world is truly happening and what that means though across the spectrum of our port is that's not just focused on the airport that propagates to the integrity of the entire airline operation and so it's not an airport technology per se it's a vital you know pipeline of content into into the world so there's a lot of I think the pace of innovation there and development accelerated differently than other places just because there was just a lot more green space or white space for those vendors to go whether or not they were newer incumbent for them to go develop new capabilities where they didn't really truly exist before yeah I think we're seeing a lot of combinatorial effects you know as John said things like you know vision have been around some of the data sets that have been leveraged have been around and it's these little tipping points where these things get combined and then automated and then maybe have a layer of AI put over the top that massively it creates something far greater than the sum of the original parts and then if that can be turned into a product that it's easy for for airlines and airports and other players in the industry to use and to plumb into their existing infrastructure, then you have a tipping point where capability takes a little step function. But it has been a crazy two years in terms of we've had air frame issues, we've had engine issues, we've had air space issues and conflict, we've had oil issues, we've had meteorological and climate issues and so the demands on airlines to constantly adapt and constantly plan and re-plan and optimize and re-optimize. The demand side is just gets more and more challenging all the time and then on the supply side it's sort of there's a bit of a lag but you know what we're waiting to see is the response to that and the identification of the opportunities that all of this additional demand brings. So Claire do you agree do you see it being quite lumpy almost in terms of innovation where you get like pockets of activity where people build on the skills and the knowledge and the product that's gone before and that's where we see that tipping point and that leap forward and in other areas is a dearth or a lack of attention and a lack of innovation. Are you seeing it as quite lumpy across the across the landscape? I think lumpy is a great term to describe it. I think some areas have shot forward more than others and my background is in crewing I spent 20 years in crewing at Southwest Airlines both in the planning and day of ops space before moving into consulting and what I experienced in my own career and what we've seen with multiple clients is they're still on 20 plus year crew tracking technology and I think crewing is inherently more complex and you're dealing with people that's that's one part of it but also the rules that have to be implemented and I think from what I've heard from some vendors they think you know airlines are stuck in their legacy ways and they're not willing to you know change well crewing rules are not optional you either got your your federal rules which are your flight duty time limitations those are absolutely not optional airlines can be fine for violating those and then you have the union rules and those are mandatory as well and every airline has their own flavor of work rules and usually those work rules are even different between pilots and cabin crew and the ability to implement those rules quickly in either a crew tracking replacement system or a day of ops solver is I think one of the big challenges and we've seen carriers go down paths multi-year paths of trying to replace their systems only to start back over from scratch and abandon and decide to build a house so I think what we've seen with crewing is that you know airlines are still many airlines are still on old systems and using other vendors as kind of add-ons or building their own add-ons to get the information that they need from their systems and those things may be using AI but where I think there could be a real potential is if someone comes into the market and is able to quickly translate and airlines rules now the airline also has to have all of the rules documented and a lot of times I think they don't have those all dock well documented it's it's in their experience people's heads and I know airlines lost quite a bit bit of experience during covid I think that really if someone can take those rules and easily translate sentences into code which I think is something that AI is fairly good at I think someone could come in and disrupt that space quite easily but we just haven't seen that yet yeah there's definitely an opportunity there I mean airlines are very wary of touching the core of systems that have been in for many many years but as Claire was saying the ability to bolt things on little appliances that come and add value there's always going to be an integration challenge but generally the rewards of being able to make even incremental changes are really significant and the same goes for you know all of the historical things aircraft, trim, weight and balance all of these things you know have have within them you know really significant benefits and the airline you know different airlines have different levels of complexity I mean you know Claire was saying you have different rules between pilots and crew but lots of airlines have different rules from one pilot to another where two airlines have merged you'll have pilots who are on one contract and pilots are on another contract and so you know the sort of combinatorial complexity this turns us systemic complexity gets to a point sometimes where airlines just sort of almost freeze up they get to the point where they can't move things in efficient ways so that yeah something has to give eventually there and I think you know that you know certainly you know if AI delivers on some of its promises this previously insurmountable complexity might start to be unnoted and often I guess any sort of investment needs an opportunity so an opportunity for reducing costs making revenue improving the customer experience but from from my experience the revenue case is always seems to be prime the always the one that people go after in terms of creating products and solutions because that's often where finance put their budget do you think that maybe an investment in operations is always investment in cost savings and that's perhaps what's holding the industry back or do you think it's more than that is that too simple of a way of looking at it clear what do you think I think airlines are quite good at coming up with revenue justifications for commercial software improvements or technology improvements airlines I would say in general are I would give a B maybe a B minus based on what I've seen for estimating cost savings related to a system but when I think about full cost of disruption and I think T2RL and ASG have put out a joint white paper about quantifying the full cost of disruption what's really missing is the revenue impact on future bookings and customer sentiment related to disruptions and we've seen multiple just sort of examples of huge disruptions and the you know hundreds of millions of dollars at a large airlines probably I think Southwest disruption maybe got into the billion range of both quantifiable hard costs and then you know I'm not even sure if those include the you know intangible cost the full cost of disruption related to future customer bookings are lack thereof so I think you know we we have clients who are interested in this and we've been able to help them better quantify that I think there are a lot of opportunities for airlines to really do some analysis up front to quantify how these systems can help them save tangible costs and intangible costs and you know that will give them a better justification for these huge spends because these are these are multi-year replacements usually for for a large airline system for an add-on system that we just spoke about you know little add-on systems I think those can really be implemented much more quickly but if you're talking about replacing an ops control system or a crew tracking system those are you know once in a career and could be career ending if they don't go well once in a career endeavors and those you know usually are quite costly and so airlines I think could get much better internal funding for those if they do more workup front and I think they could get better results by doing that workup front because they can they can know really what they need what are the features that we need in order to be able to deliver these cost savings and so doing that homework doing that due diligence up front I think will really benefit airlines when they're going out shopping for ops software. The way you know I look at this as as Claire mentioned you know you have this big chunky investments that if if I put my name on the line for that it's to the degree that these are board level requests for funding because there are hundreds of millions of dollars across X years but what is the RLI and RLI is typically measured on cost savings and not even so much on revenue generation but Claire's point about revenue loss is a good one but I think we're most of the ops centers, ops centers mindset is we are a cost center we're not developing in salary revenue opportunities we're not developing new Ford well we could be impacting Ford bookings we could be impacting the opportunity to capture in salary revenue but they're typically thinking of how do I maintain operational integrity so that I can start tomorrow And if you look at it from that perspective, what are the systems that help me operate? In those additive systems, don't require board-level approval to get funding. Those are different echelons of spend, different echelons of risk to go take them in. And so if I am a senior executive or a leader in ops organization within their line, I have a smaer of a portfolio of 50 to hundreds of different applications and vendors. But you typically have these core ones that we covered in our report. And I think the point is, if I'm going out to market, you know, Bert and I saw this with Riyadh Air in over years ago, that's a once in a career opportunity to say, hey, you've a clean canvas to look at all of these systems. But in reality, I have a fixed budget, what am I going to do year-over-year? And am I going to replace my flight planning system or crewing system if so one? And how do I think through it? Yeah. And business changes, particularly in ops. I mean, everybody hates their ops systems until you try and take them away and replace them with something else. And it's like, don't touch anything. I just got it the way I like it. So, you know, I think there are opportunities on both sides in cost and revenue. I think the issue is, people aren't really measuring the link between operations performance and revenue in the way that they measure it between OTP and cost. So there's this element of the sin of the single indicator. I think the other thing is about cost savings feel real, right? I mean, demand is stochastic. Revenue comes and goes, but a low cost base is your friend forever. And also, you know, revenue tends to get discounted by finance in the business case. It may materialize or it may not, but cost savings always feel very real. But the key to all of this, the opportunity identification has to come from data and analysis. You have to be able to create a link that you can show to the board when you go for your funding case and say, there is a direct proven link between what we do here and these elements of cost and revenue. And by changing this, we can move the needle on those things. And so not just the measurement of the causality, but then the measurement of benefit, having that data, having the telemetry, being able to do that analysis and prove the case is absolutely critical for getting these things signed up. You know, I don't think that there's a lack of willingness to engage in these things. I just think that sometimes the business cases are a little bit hand-wavy. And the risk always seems enormous when you're trying to move things around and off. And that just leads to a lot of not necessarily indecision, but the choice to not do anything is just so much easier. Yeah, yeah. It's kind of into a no-brainer for me, you know, to make it real. And you know, I should have no doubt that it's all about signing this off. And I think that that's just a, you know, that's just a challenge in getting a project started in launching the project and, you know, sort of running through a project from start to finish and then implementing the amount of work and extra headcount for an airline that that takes in the ops space is huge. And I think we've seen clients underestimate that. I think I've personally underestimated that previously in my career at an airline. clients really need to do their homework at the beginning too on who do they need to sort of manage these projects from a subject matter expertise perspective because the experience level is not as deep at many airlines because there have been a lot of retirements over the past few years, especially since COVID. So I think, you know, having the right people sort of steering these large replacements is critical and making sure they're not also running the operation at the same time because the operation is always going to win. The, the criticality of making those daily decisions is, is always going to take priority unless you have dedicated, experienced people, you know, set aside for the duration of these projects. I was going to say that the expertise thing is kind of critical because, you know, there has been this sort of brain drain, this sort of loss of historical knowledge. And I think that airlines very often really benefit from an outside view because it's very easy to sort of develop a kind of tunnel vision around what's possible and what can be done and how, what's the right way of doing things. And I think having the outside view very often and understanding experience from other areas in the industry is a really valuable thing just to take those blinkers off for a second and say, look, if we are going to make a change, let's set back a second and look at the art of the process. You know, I think in report, we didn't really dive too deep in the sort of change management aspect of it, but, you know, what we're diving into is pretty clear, like Southwest and other airlines that had worked with previously deploying just a flight tracking product 15 years ago. There wasn't the mindset of a product owner or a person that sort of had the point of the spear at the user level to be that sort of champion for the change, but also listen to the end users as to if we are going to change from system A to B, how do you make sure it's successful and one pattern that I saw then emerging, this is before scaling agile was taking a route and all that and I know that goes way off in a tangent, but the point here is there were people that were appointed as part of the project team that came off the floor and that was at a time where the airline had enough resources to do that. You know, you have enough staffing to run your operation because these people have to do administration work to do the training and requirements gathering for the RFP, but also the requirements gathering after the RFP as you're deploying. And what we had seen then was somebody had risen to become that sort of champion and all of the users would come to them to be that first line of support, which is really critical as you go live or on an ongoing basis for version one, version two, version three that gets deployed. It's not just that initial trance that gets deployed, but you're going to have a relationship with that vendor going forward and a lot of what goes into the mindset of the airline is not just the actual RFP process, but how do you help us through change management, how do you adopt new requirements as we go forward, how do you assimilate that into your roadmap, but how do you listen to us as users and all that sort of stuff. We don't get that into that too much in our report, but I think it's, you know, a fundamental thing to understand. It's not just a one shot selection, you're developing a new relationship, and so how does that going to track going forward as you select the different vendor and I mean, all very good points. And I really am a little bit nervous about asking this next question because I know that we put a lot, or I feel that we put a lot of onus on the vendors to get it right, and we put a lot of onus on the vendors to say, hey, the need is out there and we can solve this need. We can meet this need. When really it is a partnership approach in my humble opinion that, you know, the airline and the vendors need to work together to solve problems, but to what extent do you think that vendors could do better in the operations space about making a case for change? Do you have any thoughts on that regard, Siegfried? Yeah, just say one of the points we made was that in deployment flexibility matters. So that probably speaks to what I was previously talking about. But there's probably like three or four sort of things that we mentioned in their report. It was really around integration, whether or not it's within other core systems at the airline, other vendors, but also sort of integration amongst their product portfolio. So if, you know, as a formal product manager, you think about what is my, you know, unique value of my X number of capabilities with my product, how does that create a value proposition? The value proposition now in the day of AI, you know, allowing people to develop things much faster is a little bit more challenge. It's not just one or two features. It's how does, how do those features work together in concert with others to create more of an intelligent workflow for the users? So for example, if you're adding another product on my desktop, is that going to, is that going to help my throughput as somebody dispatching more flights or handling a scenario with more, you know, pressure put upon me, how can I handle that more efficiently? So for a vendor, as you have integration that is raised from where it was to where it should be, if it's a little bit more cohesive, then I as the human and no longer sort of the integration layer, you're now able to provide me insights to sort of manage by exception. So that puts the onus on the vendors to not just bolt on all these additional features or an airline to bolt on other vendors to fill in gaps. I still need to reduce sort of that cognitive load of a user so that they can make decisions. You're trying to help them, not add more workload on top of them. And so integration has always been a point that has been sort of this golden thread for many years, but as you have more and more data, more and more sort of patchwork of other capabilities getting added, simplifying the workflow is much more paramount for you to sender. Especially as you start adding AI and that's why you see a lot of folks shifting to natural language interactions of give me insights as to why something did this. And then it'll go mind the data and surface it as opposed to me, you know, scanning through different applications to come up with my own opinion. So it's sort of a mixed sort of in transition from sort of that legacy sort of scan and eyes on glass to this proactive monitoring with with more and more data. So for a vendor that means you need to figure out how to orchestrate sort of your how do you architect your information layer and orchestrate all of those alerts and monitoring so that the user's workload is lower and they're able to make these costs or safety-based decisions much more efficiently and consistently. So if I made a cancellation decision given the same hand of cards and Claire comes in to relieve me, are we putting out a consistent product from the ops control perspective, not just the individual. So it's very layered there but the whole point is the vendors just can't keep on adding more and more and more and expect the users to just be able to digest it, right? So you got to make it simpler as you add new capabilities. Yeah, I think there's a couple of things. I mean don't just be a suspect. Don't just be a vendor. Don't just be trying to sell your own products. Vendors are repositories of industry knowledge and best practice. They have lots of customers and they can bring insights to each of their customers on what the art of the possible is in terms of trying to prove and then improve. And then the second thing they can do is break down the silos and join up the data as John was saying and help the airline build the business case for moving towards that north star of optimization or whatever it is. And that's the difference really between being a supplier and being a department. And the best advert that a vendor can have to the industry is that all of your customers are successful. You know that they are the ones who are doing the most optimal. It's your greatest advert is how well your customers do. Oh, and come to our conference and tell us about it. And I think that is, you know, what I was thinking is that vendors can do better to earn the trust of airlines. And I think airline operations people are more skeptical maybe than some of the other areas of the airline because they're dealing with, you know, where the rubber hits the road. So I think vendors would do well to under promise and over deliver and to have that proof that you mentioned Bert of happy customers. And, you know, focus, it's a tricky balance because vendors need to market. They need to get interest in their products. But the operators that I've worked with and, you know, talked to at conferences throughout my career, there's an inherent distrust of vendors because they feel like they're being sold something that isn't what it seems when they see it in front of them. And I don't think that's done intentionally. But I think, you know, vendors need to have a better understanding of the airlines operation and even that specific airlines operation before they're going and selling. And then I think they need to be really upfront about what they can and can't provide. Yeah. Absolutely. Fantastic. I have just looked at the clock, guys. And believe it or not, we're at time already. I guess one last question. And it's probably for me because I am not an operation systems expert. So I'm hearing a lot about users and I'm hearing a lot of about, you know, making it easier from inside the operation. I'm kind of imagining it from a customer. So if I'm a traveler and I'm going from Dublin to T2RL in Gate, which takes place in September in London. And the airline that I'm on has made maybe some suboptimal choices in its operations technology. What's the worst that can happen to me? Like what? Maybe a picture from a customer's perspective. Claire, what could I encounter airlines make suboptimal choices in this again? So some of it is the data that's displayed to you in the airport on the screens in your app. If the operations data is inaccurate, you're going to be making decisions based off of inaccurate data. Then the airline may also be making decisions based off of inaccurate data. They may be assigning a crew to a flight thinking this flight is supposed to leave at X time. Well, that crew is legal for the flight based off of this inaccurate time. And so now you have a crew time out. And your flight might be canceled when you've been sitting there already delayed for hours. So I think, you know, some of it could just be why is this flight delayed? I don't have the information. The screens telling me it's this time versus this time versus getting on the plane, getting boarded, sitting there for a long time, and then not getting to your conference in London, and missing out on that. So I think, you know, it can be just as simple as misinformation. And as, you know, impactful as missing a wedding or a funeral or a conference. Well, that's simply done. Claire, you have now made me an evangelist for better operation systems in the airline domain. Okay, guys, I think that that's times up. So thank you all very much for joining our T-T world talks today for a very interesting discussion on operation systems. I would like to thank Claire and John from SeaBreat airline strategy group for joining today's conversation. In addition to Bert Craven from T-T world for joining in the conversation. Thank you very much. And for anyone interested in this topic, hopefully by the time this podcast airs, the report that we've been speaking about today will be available to download for subscribers on T2RL.net. Thank you very much, team in the studio, and thank you listeners for tuning in and listening. Bye, thank you.