2026.09.24 | GP | Software | Air Space Intelligence Customer View

Optimization

Primary:

Air Space Intelligence, Inc.

Associated:

LDOS

HO:FP

PLTR

Jeppesen ForeFlight, Inc.

Lufthansa Systems GmbH & Co. KG

Alaska Airlines, Inc.

ALK

Viewpoint:

Customer

Moderator: Deepak Gour (DG)

| Sep 23, 2026 | 21 Min Read

Pasha Saleh (PS), Head of Corporate Development - Alaska Airlines

SU MMARY

Overview

The transcript covers a discussion about Airspace Intelligence (ASI), a company offering advanced operational software solutions for the aviation industry. The expert, with extensive experience in commercial aviation and strategic roles at major airlines and aerospace firms, provides insights into the adoption and impact of ASI's technology. The conversation highlights the challenges of outdated technology in the aviation sector and the need for modernization to improve efficiency and operational effectiveness.

Key Insights

The expert emphasizes the outdated nature of current aviation technology, likening it to systems just a generation ahead of Microsoft DOS. This highlights the industry's need for modernization. ASI is praised for providing a transformative solution that offers real-time, efficient flight planning, akin to Google Maps for aviation, which significantly improves operational efficiency. The expert notes that while ASI offers significant advantages, it is not a system of record, meaning airlines must still rely on legacy systems for official documentation and compliance. The potential for ASI to replace traditional systems like Jeppesen in the future is discussed, but regulatory and cost considerations remain significant barriers.

Competitive Landscape

Company/Platform

Market Position

Strengths

Weaknesses

Jeppesen

Dominant in North America

Comprehensive operational software suite

Outdated technology

Lido/Lufthansa Systems

Strong in Europe

Established system of record

Limited presence in North America

ASI

Thales

Palantir

Emerging player

Advanced, real-time flight planning

Not a system of record

Government-focused

Infrastructure for air traffic control

Not suitable for airlines

Government contractor

Big infrastructure projects

Too expensive for airlines

Quantitative Insights

Metric

Insight

Flight Time Reduction

Average savings of 2-3 minutes per flight

Daily Operations

Approximately 1,400 flights per day

Dispatcher Role

100 dispatchers in the expert's airline, 400 in larger airlines

Conclusion

The discussion highlights the significant impact of ASI's technology on flight efficiency and predictability, offering substantial cost savings and operational improvements. However, the reliance on legacy systems for regulatory compliance and the cost pressures in the airline industry pose challenges to fully adopting new technologies like ASI. The expert's insights provide a comprehensive view of the current state and future potential of aviation operational software.

DG: Okay, good morning. My name is Deepak Gour and I'm a senior analyst at Guidepoint Insight. Welcome to today's call on Airspace Intelligence, which is the ASI now. Our advisor for the session is Pasha Saleh. Pasha, thank you for joining us today. And before we start, could you please provide us with a brief overview of your professional background?

PS: Yes, so I've spent my entire life in commercial aviation. I started over 30 years ago. I learned to fly while I was in high school and became an airline pilot after college, and I was a pilot for Continental Airlines for almost a decade. After that, I returned to business school, did my MBA and joined McKinsey, and I focused exclusively on airline and aerospace projects with McKinsey. I've gone on to work in sales leadership roles both at aircraft manufacturers. I was in strategy at Boeing. So essentially, I've spent now more years on the business side of aviation than I ever did in a cockpit. For the last 9 years, I've been at , which is the fifth largest airline in the US and one of the oldest in the world. Interestingly, it's the only legacy airline in America that's never been through a bankruptcy, so exceptionally well- managed company, but at the same time very tech forward. was the first airline to sell a ticket on the internet and the first to use GPS in airplanes. And so my idea was we should have a venture capital arm to take advantage of all this IP that we're generating over the years. And so, 6 years ago, I started the venture capital part of the airline. We now have a really expansive portfolio of technology investments and one of the major areas is on operations, operational software, because that's an area that you can get a lot of efficiency out of, expensive capital assets like airplanes and people... we have expensive labor contracts, so how do we manage our people? And so, as it turns out, we're talking about Airspace Intelligence today. This is a company that I actually discovered before they were even involved in aviation, so lots to tell you about that.

DG: Yeah, sounds great. Thanks for the background, Pasha. So coming back to ASI, tell us what led you to explore or adopt a solution like ASI and what tools or processes were you using prior to that?

PS: Yeah, so the tech stack for commercial aviation is shockingly old, obsolete even. It appears to be 1 generation newer than Microsoft DOS. It's really old systems that our entire aviation architecture is running on. And it's for a couple of reasons. 1, airlines don't have a lot of money to invest in things. We typically... I mentioned we're the only airline that hasn't been bankrupt, but it doesn't mean that we're hugely profitable either. It's a very difficult industry to make long-term profit in, and as a result, you have an aging technology stack, and this is all very critical software that has to have 100% uptime; it can't fail. The problem we're trying to solve is: can we take advantage of what's happened in the rest of software? When you look at your iPhone, for example, it's intuitive, doesn't need all the training, it never

crashes or locks or has to be rebooted. We were really looking for modernizing software, but in a way that wouldn't be disruptive to a very fragile environment that exists. And so that was what we were trying to solve.

DG: Understood. So talk about your initial evaluation process, or how did you reach out to ASI? What all other solutions or alternatives had you considered? And it will be great if you can share strengths and weaknesses of each of these solutions, like Palantir, Thales, or Leidos for that matter.

PS: Yeah, so prior to ASI, we were using, almost all of our software came from 1 company, Jeppesen, which is very common for the US. I was a former strategist at Jeppesen. So I have a very inside perspective on how, you know, not inside like secret information, nothing like that. But I have a firsthand view of why this is so dominant. You can think of Jeppesen, which used to be owned wholly by Boeing, and last year it was sold to private equity to a company called Thoma Bravo. But Jeppesen is the Microsoft Office of airline operational software. 90% plus of North American airlines run on Jeppesen. In Europe, the mix is less. It's more dominated by a company called Lido, which is owned by Lufthansa Systems, but that doesn't really exist in the US. So you can think of Jeppesen. They have a solution for scheduling pilots, for maintenance, for planning flights from A to B, anything you need to. It's sort of an airline in a box. The problem is it's been, again, underinvested in for a long time. It's just old software. And so that was the solution we were using, same as every other airline in America, until I met ASI.

DG: Understood. So how does ASI compare with Jeppesen? I'm sure in terms of functionality and solution offered, there might be a huge difference. And what about the other solution provider like Palantir or Thales or any other solution which you might be aware of? Can you just give us a comparison of ASI with those modern platforms?

PS: Yeah, there are really only 2 platforms that airline customers use. In North America, it's Jeppesen. Like I said, almost 100% market share. And in Europe, it's 50% Jeppesen, 50% Lido/Lufthansa systems. I'm not sure about Asia. The other ones you mentioned, Thales is how they pronounce it. Thales is a French company. They don't sell to airlines. Their customer is the government. They power the infrastructure for air traffic control, the control towers, the radar sites, all of that is running on Thales. And Palantir, well, they're just a big general government contractor. So again, they would never deal with an airline; they'd be far too expensive for any airline. So when you see Palantir, they're involved in much more of the big infrastructure layer. Government would be their sole customer. And so really for customers like us, it's Jeppesen, it's Lido, there's a company called Sabre that makes some software, but really 90+% Jeppesen. ASI is a relatively new guy. They've been around for 6 or 7 years, and it was in fact our airline that gave them their start in aviation.

DG: Understood. And so can you tell us what all product or capabilities are you currently using from ASI and how does it fit into your workflows? If you can give some example, it will be great.

PS: Yeah, so ASI is a much more limited solution than Jeppesen. So if you think about it, Jeppesen is the software... Microsoft Office is really the best analogy I can give for US and North American airlines. It powers everything from maintenance planning to scheduling people to telling you how to plan a flight. ASI is a much more limited; they only focus on one subset of that solution, which is the planning of the flights: how do I get an airplane from A to B in the quickest, safest, shortest, most efficient route, avoiding storms, avoiding areas where the military is flying and you can't fly, avoiding, for example, you cannot fly over the Super Bowl when the sports games are happening. There's a million constraints, and they're dynamic. The skies, you might look up and the sky looks, it's empty, but it's actually filled with thousands of constraints that change minute by minute. ASI interprets all that and tells the flight planner in the airline, "This is the best route to take for this flight." And it's very similar to what Google Maps or Waze would be for a driver, except in 3 dimensions and more complexity. And so that's the solution. Prior to that, we were using... and it's so transformative. I would say it's the difference from a physical paper map to Google Maps, whereas the paper map is static, it doesn't change. Google Maps is taking into account what other drivers are doing, road closures, all in real time, and that's what it gives you today. Before ASI, airlines really had a lot less visibility into an ideal route. A

person at an airline is called a dispatcher, is the person who uses this software. A dispatcher shows up to work 2 hours before a flight departs the gate and sits down at their desk and starts looking on the internet. They usually have 15 or 16 tabs open in their browser. They're looking at CNN to see has a terrorist attack happened and everything shut down. They're looking at wind weather forecasts, they're looking at the schedule of sports games I told you to see what areas to avoid, they're looking at where the president may be flying. All these things, and in their mind, they form a route that seems ideal, and they enter that into Jeppesen, which was our planning software prior to ASI, as a series of coordinates: A, B, C, D, E, all the way from departure to destination. ASI does that in milliseconds, instantly. It's through APIs that are exposed to all these data feeds. And so really, it's a step change difference in the paradigm shift even, productivity.

DG: Understood. Like you mentioned, Jeppesen is a broader solution. So in a way, ASI wouldn't be replacing Jeppesen completely, but anyone using ASI would be using it along with a solution like Jeppesen, right?

PS: That's exactly right. And in fact, they have to be. So in aviation software, there's an important term to understand, which is called a system of record. That is an official government term, meaning if you are going to be an airline, you must purchase your software from this set of vendors. You must buy your airplanes from this set of people. It's either Boeing, Airbus, or Embraer. That's it. You can't buy your aircraft from Joe's Airplane Shop. It's not certified. And so similarly, software that's gone through the FAA's really rigorous multi-year process to be tested to make sure it's absolutely bulletproof is called a system of record. It's also auditable and traceable, and 10 years from now, they can look back and say, why was this pilot scheduled to fly on this day when they only had had X number of hours of rest the night before and changed time zones 4 times? That's why there was an accident, they can trace all that through a system of record. And to get that qualification is years and years and years. It could be up to 5 or 7 years from scratch. And so ASI, because they were a startup, they were venture-backed, they could not afford to do that. And so to this day, they're not a system of record. So if you are an airline and want the efficiencies that ASI provides... they do produce better routes, they do it quickly with less people involved... you still need to have a system of record, whether that's Jeppesen or Lido. There's another one I thought of. It's called FlightKeys. That's another piece of operational software, which is a system of record, but not so advanced. So you have to use them in parallel. And that's indeed how we use it. We use ASI first to say, what is the best route? Then a human being looks at that route and uses their 30 years of experience and says, yes or no, I agree, that's safe. And if they do, they quite literally copy and paste the route, which is a long series of points, into the Jeppesen software, which is our system of record, and that then becomes the official record that that flight is about to occur and has occurred and is kept in the FAA's records.

DG: Understood. And talk about what kind of pricing structure and commercial model does ASI follows and how does it compare with other alternative solution without getting into details or specifics?

PS: Yeah, I can't share the pricing, but they are a SaaS company. All of their, you know, it's all hosted in the cloud on AWS, in fact, is how they run. So they price very similar to other SaaS companies. It's a per user license fee per month and you just pay for the number of users and within an airline the customer is a person called a dispatcher and dispatcher is a role that airlines hire for. It's a person who's gone to 2 years of specialized schooling and carries a license from the FAA just like a pilot carries a pilot's license. They have a dispatcher license and it means that they're qualified to interpret aviation data, meteorology, weather, and make a plan for a flight such that there's enough fuel to do it, that it's safe. And so the dispatchers are the ones. A bigger airline like United or Delta would have 400 roughly. And so ASI charges a license fee for each one of them to be able to log in and access the system.

DG: Understood. And how is the implementation and onboarding experience with ASI and did you face any kind of challenges and or was the implementation and integration quite smooth?

PS: Well, our case is unique. As I told you in the beginning of our call, we actually gave rise to ASI. So I have to tell you a quick origin story. The way I met ASI was through the venture capital work that I'm doing at the airline. I had a

mutual friend in common with their founder. At the time, this is 7 years ago, ASI wasn't even called ASI. It was called Uni Intelligence. And they were working on self-driving cars through a grant from Google in San Francisco and they had no connection to aviation and the founder who had a friend in common with me reached out to our mutual friend and said if we're successful does this technology have application anywhere else maritime, logistics, packages, aviation? And our mutual friend said, well, I know someone at an airline who could tell you. And so as soon as I met them, I brought them to our network operations center, which is a 24-hour nerve center where airlines... it's mission control for the airline... all the flights are on a big, big screen in real time. You can communicate with them, see where they're going, how much fuel is left in each one, if they're having an emergency or diversion or whatever. When the founder of ASI looked at that, again, remember he's coming from a background of routing cars through San Francisco, he realized this is a much easier problem to solve. When a self-driving car has to react to a child running in the street or a ball rolling in front of things that are chaotic, whereas in the sky there's nothing random. You give an intent to file flight plans by sending a message called a flight plan 2 hours before you do it, and they said, wow, there's nothing chaotic or random, we can just interpret the intent of every other airplane and create an optimal path for our airplane. And so they decided on the spot to pivot to aviation. And so when you asked about how the implementation was, we actually helped build it. And that's the Waze, Google Maps thing I told you about. And so we ended up ultimately becoming the first customer of that, but not until 2 or 3 years had passed because again, we built a product from scratch and then tested it to the point where it was an MVP, minimum viable product, and then we did a long pilot phase where we trialed it. And then when it finally passed all that, we became the first customers. After that, United became a customer and Delta became a customer, but that took many more years.

DG: Understood. And in your usage and observation of the past 6, 7 years, can you tell us, like, is there any limitation or product gap which you have experienced, and any kind of improvement which you would want to see in them in future?

PS: It's an incredible product. It's completely unlike anything we have seen in this industry in the sense that it is truly 21st century modern software. I'm not an engineer, so I couldn't tell you how it's built, but just the experience of it. For example, if you've ever been to an airport, you know, to change your flight or to request a different seat, you would observe that the person on the other end of the counter is typing and typing and typing. And you're wondering, are they creating a novel? I just want to move to an aisle seat. Why does all this typing? It's because the entire backbone of aviation software is so archaic. It's all command prompt based; you have to type things like C slash, backslash, colon, asterisk, and you have to know that whole language. Same on the operational side, probably worse. ASI is more like the iPhone. No training needed; it's so obvious how it works. As an example, if a dispatcher in today's software with Jeppesen or something wants to know the wind at a certain location, they have to type in all these commands and interpret a bunch of text which appears. With ASI, you put your mouse over a map and hover over, and all of a sudden you see visual animations of wind and you can see where it's stronger, where it's more favorable, where it's not. Totally intuitive. So our experience has been that this is just a night and day difference. You asked about what could be better. Honestly, nothing in terms of product. It's a 10 out of 10 for sure. But we wish that it was a system of record because it still involves us to keep our legacy technology in place. Because this is a regulated business, you can't just buy software from whoever. And so we now have to do a 2-step operation, whereas before we only had 1. And so we're getting more efficiency out of using it, but the next iteration would be for it to replace Jeppesen and replace Lido and replace FlightKeys, which is the third system of record that wasn't on your list but should be.

DG: Understood. And what measurable benefit or ROI have you achieved since adopting ASI?

PS: The benefits have been incredible. So there's actually 3 horizons of benefit. Horizon 1, the most obvious direct benefit is our flights on average are arriving shorter. The flight times are shorter. And why? Because it finds shortcuts. It's able to find ways through its machine learning to take a more direct path. That translates directly into fuel that

wasn't consumed, CO2 that wasn't emitted into the atmosphere, and also wages. You know, pilots and flight attendants are paid by the minute, actually. And so if the flight is shorter, that's less labor. So that's the very most direct benefit is that it's saving us a lot of time, fuel, and energy and labor cost. The second benefit, which is even more interesting, is that the flights are arriving more predictably. So I always tell people if you've ever been on a flight that arrived suddenly half an hour early, it's not because the pilots flew faster. Sometimes they say that. I'm actually a pilot for our airline and so I know the trick. You don't fly faster. Airplanes fly at 1 speed. It's the aerodynamic efficient speed for the airplane. The reason you sometimes ended up somewhere way earlier than scheduled is because the schedules have built into them over time lots of padding, a lot of fat. Because we don't know if we're going to encounter traffic, if the gate will be occupied, so you build in 20, 30 minutes here, 5 minutes there and over years, it's when you look at a flight from Boston to San Francisco, it's not reflecting the actual flight time. It's all this uncertainty. And on days when those things don't line up and you just happen to get there 30 minutes early, but it's really not early, that's the true time. With ASI, because the routes are more efficient, they avoid airspace proactively rather than being flying along and being put into a holding pattern because you're now about to fly through a restricted military zone. You knew that 3 hours early and slightly avoided it. Because of that, the flights are arriving much more predictably on time. And that allows us to schedule to rebuild our schedules to have more usage out of the airplane. And that's the third horizon. So we're getting... first horizon is fuel and labor savings, second is more predictability of arrival time and third is over long term you may be able to deploy your airplanes to make more money elsewhere because you're not building all this padding into the schedule and now you have more utility of your assets. So. Really a lot of value generation.

DG: Understood. And my last question, Pasha, is more like a hypothetical one. What factor might lead you or any other airline to completely switch away from ASI?

PS: The number one is always cost with an airline. We are so extremely cost conscious in the airline business, especially now. If you look at any airline, you can roughly divide the costs into buckets, into 3 buckets. Roughly a third of the total cost to run an airline is fuel, somewhere between 30% and 40%. Another third is labor, all the wages, pilots, flight attendants, management, maintenance, engineers, everyone. It's another third. And the remaining third would be aircraft leases, marketing, you know, that sort of back office expense. And so today, the fuel bucket has increased dramatically because of the war in Iran and all the macroeconomic problems. And so when you take a third of the cost of an airline and you're nearly doubling it, or $120 a barrel of oil, that puts pressure on the others. You can't change labor because most airlines, almost all of US airlines have unions and so they're locked into long-term employment contracts that can't be altered. You have to be renewed 5, 6 years at a time. So your pilot salaries are fixed, your flight attendant salaries, your mechanic salaries are fixed. Your fuel has now nearly doubled, the squeeze has to come from things like this, like do we have to have ASI? No, but we do have to have a system of record. So if push comes to shove, you know, that's the things you can get rid of even though it's producing great efficiency. It's not a system of record, which means we can technically operate our airline without it. And so that would be the big thing. Or the other one would be if it ceased to be supported. They've been fantastic to work with in terms of customer support. If we have any problems at all, they even have a portal. This is unheard of in any kind of airline software. There's a portal within the software itself where the dispatcher in real time can chat with a customer service person. They can say, hey, you know, today I tried to look for the turbulence reports and there was a glitch and within 15 minutes on average, there'll be a text response working on it and it's usually fixed within hours. And so if that level of support was to deteriorate, that's another thing that could cause us to switch away. But I'm not aware of any competitive offering on the market that's even close to doing what they do.

DG: Understood. And if someone is switching from ASI or similar solution to another solution, how challenging or easy would be that migration?

PS: I would say it would be relatively easy because there's no local hosting involved. It's all cloud-based. When you

purchase ASI, what you're really getting, like I said, is licenses to access. You get a login to a website. And so it would be as simple as just not logging into it. It's not tied into our infrastructure in any way. It's not hosted on our servers. Because it's so well-designed, there's no training involved. So it would be easy to sunset, but a lot of value would also be lost.

DG: Understood. So, Pasha, I've covered all the topics I wanted to for today's discussion and we can conclude our call. Thank you so much. This was really very helpful and insightful.

PS: Okay, you're welcome. Take care.

DG: Yeah, thank you. Bye-bye.

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