Case Study · AI Concept
A pilot-collaboration concept that reframes how cockpit crews request and approve in-flight reroutes — cutting the loop with dispatch and giving pilots a clearer view of viable, real-world routes.
When conditions change mid-flight — weather, traffic, fuel, an opening in restricted airspace — pilots have to send a route-change request to dispatch and wait for approval. The cycle is slow, asymmetric, and creates real cost.
While dispatch evaluates the request from the ground, the aircraft keeps flying its filed plan. Minutes of back-and-forth on radio or ACARS turn into miles of inefficient routing — extra fuel burn, late arrivals, and missed connections downstream. The information the pilot can see out of the windscreen and on their instruments is rarely matched by what dispatch is looking at on their monitors.
I worked with a working pilot to map the actual decision points and the language they use. The pattern was clear: the bottleneck isn’t pilot judgment — it’s the workflow that surrounds the request.
Dispatch and crew aren’t looking at the same picture. Pilots see real-time conditions; dispatch sees flight plans and policy.
Reroute requests rely on radio or ACARS messaging. By the time a new route is approved, the opportunity has often shrunk.
Every minute of inefficient routing adds fuel cost and risks knock-on delays for downstream flights and crews.
SkyPath puts the reroute decision where it belongs: with the pilot, on a map of actual routes pilots fly today, with dispatch context, weather, and fuel deltas surfaced before the request is sent.
The interface is built in Tailwind CSS with a Leaflet map of real airway segments, modeled on the kinds of cockpit instrument panels pilots already trust. Reroute candidates are scored against fuel, time, weather, and airspace constraints, and the request to dispatch becomes a single confirmation — not a free-text negotiation.
The concept emphasizes shared context: when the pilot sees a faster path, dispatch sees the same path, scored the same way, and can approve or counter in seconds instead of minutes.
Aviation runs on tight margins. Shaving minutes off reroute decisions compounds across thousands of flights — in fuel, in on-time performance, and in pilot trust.
Faster reroute approvals reduce time spent on suboptimal paths. Less fuel burned per flight means lower cost and lower carbon output across the fleet.
Recovering minutes mid-flight protects downstream connections, crew duty windows, and gate availability at busy hubs.
A shared, scored view of the same options replaces ambiguous radio negotiation with a transparent decision both sides can stand behind.
SkyPath isn’t about replacing dispatch — it’s about closing the information gap that makes the current process slow. The point of designing it with a working pilot was to make sure the workflow respects the constraints they already operate within: regulatory, operational, and human.
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