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It will never work because you have too many human processes in the loop. This HN share by the author is selling the idea of consulting to obtain nominal efficiency on a well established process to human organizations who are structurally opposed to it, subject to human regulators who are structurally opposed to it, in an industry that is famous for aversion to change. Nice try drumming up clients, but realistically you're not going to move the mountain a millimeter on this one. Quicker to wait for AI airports, AI ATC and AI airlines than selling to humans at this point. 20th century humanity just about spitballed together a working system, but making it efficient is not going to happen on our watch. We would do well to admit it.

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Which are these "human processes in the loop"? We are talking about changing flight schedules, and I'm pretty sure that existing flight schedules are not developed by teams of people with pen and paper, but rather by powerful ILP solvers, because of (a) the immense value in optimising every aspect of them and (b) the myriad regulatory constraints that need to be met for, e.g., flight crew scheduling.

Aviation is one of the few industries where the largest regular (non-capital) expense is something other than labour, namely fuel. Anything that reduces fuel costs even a little is of obvious interest to every airline.

There are still the issues of coordinating flight paths to avoid collisions, and regulation (including international regulation). The former seems like a technical problem amenable to increasingly accurate approximations over time. I don't know about the latter, but I doubt it's as insurmountable as you imply. International air travel has been around longer than ILP solvers, meaning that at some point flight schedules were created by people. Now they're created by ILP solvers, and the regulatory environment successfully adapted to that change.

Manual processes: Most takeoff/landing processes, navigation waypoint input/confirmation/naming/registration, ATC, regulatory, ground service, gate allocation, boarding, cargo loading, radio, one could go on...

I'm not a pilot, but there are other pilots here, and their opinion is very close to mine: the post is BS.

With the exception of navigation waypoints, none of the things you listed would actually change AFAICT.

If the industry as a whole refuses to take measures whose only impact is to drastically improve its efficiency, that would be a net negative for everyone except jet fuel sellers. In a competitive environment, such bloat would soon die. But given the level of international regulation that (I assume) exists around air travel, it might linger indefinitely.

If you said automated instead of AI that would make sense to me.

But why would you want to use AI to control planes?

It's a by-word for expert systems with management conception as well as multi-domain comprehension these days. Reasoning through failures in one sensor domain with limited data from other domains within a fixed period following strict risk protocols at 3:01AM is the sort of thing AI would excel at versus humans.

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