The $50 Billion Bloodbath: Why Airline Operations Control Centers Will Be Ghost Towns by 2030

Karee

Karee

Marginal Member
This was written by some guy on LinkedIn who many industry leaders follow. Link to the post: The $50 Billion Bloodbath: Why Airline Operations Control Centers Will Be Ghost Towns by 2030 Picture US Airlines' System or Network Operations Control Center in 2030: 400+ dispatcher desks sit… | Daniel Stecher | 78 comments

The $50 Billion Bloodbath: Why Airline Operations Control Centers Will Be Ghost Towns by 2030Picture US Airlines' System or Network Operations Control Center in 2030: 400+ dispatcher desks sit empty, replaced by AI managing 5,000 daily flights faster than any human team ever could.This isn’t speculation, it’s inevitable.The Uncomfortable Truth: Flight dispatchers, crew schedulers, and operations controllers are already obsolete. They just don’t know it yet.Every decision in an Operations Control Center is pure data: weather patterns, fuel calculations, crew duty times, maintenance windows. There’s no “human intuition” required, just mathematical optimization that AI does better, faster, and without coffee breaks.The brutal math:• Airlines spend $50B annually on operations control personnel• AI replacement cost: $50M per airline• ROI: 10,000% in year oneWhy This Hasn’t Happened Yet: Two words: regulatory cowardice.The FAA moves at glacial speed while AI systems already outperform humans on every metric that matters. We’re not waiting for technology, we’re waiting for bureaucrats to admit humans are the weak link.The Domino Effect: When one major airline goes full AI (likely by 2027), competitors have 18 months to follow or die.The AI-first airline will:• Reroute 500 flights in minutes during weather events• Optimize fuel/crew costs in real-time• Never make 3 AM arithmetic errors• Offer lower fares with higher marginsGame over.The Human Fallacy: “But complex decisions require human judgment!”Wrong. Most “judgment” in airline ops is actually bias, fatigue, and wishful thinking disguised as experience.AI doesn’t:• Get tired during night shifts• Make emotional decisions under pressure• Forget regulations or make calculation errors• Call in sick during holiday travel chaosWhat Happens to the People?These aren’t minimum-wage jobs. Flight dispatchers earn $80K-$150K with benefits. We’re talking about eliminating thousands of middle-class careers at every hub.https://lnkd.in/eJwFWFKV“Retraining” is a fantasy when AI eliminates most alternative technical roles simultaneously.The Moral Question: If AI can prevent delays, cancellations, and safety incidents better than humans, is maintaining human operations actually unethical?The countdown has begun. Airlines must choose: lead the transformation or be destroyed by competitors who do.What’s your take? Are we looking at the end of human airline operations control, or will regulatory/union resistance delay the inevitable?
 
Karee said:
This was written by some guy on LinkedIn who many industry leaders follow. Link to the post: The $50 Billion Bloodbath: Why Airline Operations Control Centers Will Be Ghost Towns by 2030 Picture US Airlines' System or Network Operations Control Center in 2030: 400+ dispatcher desks sit… | Daniel Stecher | 78 comments

The $50 Billion Bloodbath: Why Airline Operations Control Centers Will Be Ghost Towns by 2030Picture US Airlines' System or Network Operations Control Center in 2030: 400+ dispatcher desks sit empty, replaced by AI managing 5,000 daily flights faster than any human team ever could.This isn’t speculation, it’s inevitable.The Uncomfortable Truth: Flight dispatchers, crew schedulers, and operations controllers are already obsolete. They just don’t know it yet.Every decision in an Operations Control Center is pure data: weather patterns, fuel calculations, crew duty times, maintenance windows. There’s no “human intuition” required, just mathematical optimization that AI does better, faster, and without coffee breaks.The brutal math:• Airlines spend $50B annually on operations control personnel• AI replacement cost: $50M per airline• ROI: 10,000% in year oneWhy This Hasn’t Happened Yet: Two words: regulatory cowardice.The FAA moves at glacial speed while AI systems already outperform humans on every metric that matters. We’re not waiting for technology, we’re waiting for bureaucrats to admit humans are the weak link.The Domino Effect: When one major airline goes full AI (likely by 2027), competitors have 18 months to follow or die.The AI-first airline will:• Reroute 500 flights in minutes during weather events• Optimize fuel/crew costs in real-time• Never make 3 AM arithmetic errors• Offer lower fares with higher marginsGame over.The Human Fallacy: “But complex decisions require human judgment!”Wrong. Most “judgment” in airline ops is actually bias, fatigue, and wishful thinking disguised as experience.AI doesn’t:• Get tired during night shifts• Make emotional decisions under pressure• Forget regulations or make calculation errors• Call in sick during holiday travel chaosWhat Happens to the People?These aren’t minimum-wage jobs. Flight dispatchers earn $80K-$150K with benefits. We’re talking about eliminating thousands of middle-class careers at every hub.https://lnkd.in/eJwFWFKV“Retraining” is a fantasy when AI eliminates most alternative technical roles simultaneously.The Moral Question: If AI can prevent delays, cancellations, and safety incidents better than humans, is maintaining human operations actually unethical?The countdown has begun. Airlines must choose: lead the transformation or be destroyed by competitors who do.What’s your take? Are we looking at the end of human airline operations control, or will regulatory/union resistance delay the inevitable?
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Oh cool. So I guess I'll just keep pressing zero on the satcom trying to get a human.
 
We all know the threat A.I. brings to nearly every industry. Removing an added layer of regulated safety is the last thing our crews nor the flying public want to hear. Legacy carriers are already combatting this by establishing contractual language to limit the scope and implementation of A.I. that further helps protect our profession.
 
AI should be used as a tool, not as a replacement. Just as the computer allowed us to make better decisions, AI should allow dispatchers to focus on more important tasks. Maybe it will allow us to flight follow better if it can write and plan the releases. There's still a long way to go for this.

Optimizing pilot schedules, aircraft efficiency, maintenance routings, and workload planning are all mostly just data. That's where it will shine the most.

Things that are easy for humans to do will be difficult for AI to do. Things that are difficult and complex to do. AI will simplify. There will still be a need for human verification or oversight for a trial period. Just like if they want to pursue automated flying.
 
His math is way off trying to fear monger and prove his opinion. $50B spent a year on OCCs...that is just laughable. That number is significantly more than the entire net profit of all airlines combined. Or put another way, that is about the entire market cap of UAL and SWA combined.
 
Pretty sure I read Netjets uses some sort of AI flight planning tool or something, and it tends to be really bad. Saw someone say it routed an EJA executive's flight right through a line of thunderstorms and they sent it off anyone or something along those lines.
 
Those centers remind me of an ATC radar facility. One thing for sure, just like autopilots, it's important to have a human in the loop to monitor. Also the security aspect scares me with everything being so AI driven it would seem like a bad actor could muck up the works.
 
This guy has a point, but like many things in the airline industry, removing a layer or Swiss cheese is the last thing crews, passengers, general public, and airlines want. I’m not even talking about public perception, I’m talking about actual safety and economical margins.

Besides, *IF* AI does eventually replace the human in the OCC/SOC’s, us dispatchers will see it coming many years before it hits us. Out of all the positions in the SOC, dispatchers and MCC are the most involved in the live safety of each flight. AI will replace crew scheduling, load planning, customer service, etc before replacing dispatchers/MCC.
 
This guy's actual experience in an OCC is that he was a senior consultant, then a senior product manager, for Lufthansa Systems' Operations Control IT Solutions team. Now, he works at IBS as - those of us familiar with the way business works already guessed it - a VP of sales and marketing. He has never worked a single day as a dispatcher, and his understanding of the problems we deal with is limited to what other people tell him; which at this point will be (and possibly always was) whatever he wants to hear. His opinions are not just worthless, they are selling a product. They are actively harmful for us to give stock to.

Yes, some airline in the EU will probably try this in the next few years, I don't think he's wrong about that. Where he's wrong is that it won't work for them. The technology isn't there, and they will find that out very quickly. A recent MIT study shows that only 5% of custom enterprise AI tools reach production uses; this will likely be no different. Even if it does beat the odds, there will still be a human in the loop somewhere, and minimal to no cost savings will be achieved.

There may be a day when this profession has to seriously reckon with AI. But given that aviation software solutions have never been cutting-edge, I'm not holding my breath.
 
AI is coming for a lot of jobs. Even jobs we couldn’t have fathomed being automated 10 years ago (law, medicine, and finance spring to mind). The concern is, how can society leverage it in a way that benefits everyone as whole? I realize I’m quickly going down a science fiction rabbit hole that may be implausible, but if labor generally isn’t needed, could we have some Star Trek/Federation-esque post-scarcity utopia or a late stage economic hellscape where the vast majority of the population can’t work. My grasp of macroeconomics is tenuous, but how could an economy sustain itself in a traditional manner that way? More philosophically speaking, in the absence of work, where do we find meaning?
 
scramjet said:
AI is coming for a lot of jobs. Even jobs we couldn’t have fathomed being automated 10 years ago (law, medicine, and finance spring to mind). The concern is, how can society leverage it in a way that benefits everyone as whole? I realize I’m quickly going down a science fiction rabbit hole that may be implausible, but if labor generally isn’t needed, could we have some Star Trek/Federation-esque post-scarcity utopia or a late stage economic hellscape where the vast majority of the population can’t work. My grasp of macroeconomics is tenuous, but how could an economy sustain itself in a traditional manner that way? More philosophically speaking, in the absence of work, where do we find meaning?
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I've lived the loss of meaning. Former pilot (I got sick), but a huge portion of my "meaning" in life was tied into airplanes, flying them, and serving the communities and organizations I served. When that went away, I had to reinvent myself. Hilariously, I stumbled on computer stuff and I'm going to watch programming computers evaporate too. It's fine by me, but I literally studied AI in grad school. Regardless, you are asking the right questions. I cannot answer that for you - but I am in the process of answering it for myself. It's fun once you cast off some of the baggage of tying your identity to your finances. For me it took great personal loss, illness, and literal blindness - hopefully for you it can be something else.

Anyhow, the question is not "if," it's "when" for nearly every job. There are a lot of naysayers, and people saying, "it can't do what I do" and people who just generally don't like the idea of robots doing stuff, but... (sorry in advance), they're wrong and largely uninformed. If it can't do it now, as long as the money spigot doesn't turn off, it WILL be able to do pretty much anything you can think of. I currently do automation work for a living. I'm implementing these tools for a governmental organization and this is happening. The pessimists will cherry pick articles about why these are just stochastic parrots or scour arxiv to find examples of things that AI cannot do. I get it - I was in denial for a while too - but they're wrong and AI keeps marching forward. Automation (with hallucinations and all) is coming for everyone eventually provided there are not major setbacks to progress in the field. The the transitional period that we're going to live through is likely going to be filled with humans getting augmented by AI tools (you have ChatGPT fill out your BS TPS report), then elimination (ChatGPT handles all aspects of the TPS reporting process).

I spent 3 years to get my BS in math (my first BS was in aviation). I did this for fun because I love the topic. And yet, today, ChatGPT can solve more complicated problems than I could at the peak of my math nerdiness. Yes, it sometimes gets stuff wrong, and is sometimes stupid, but it is winning the international math olympiad. So is Google's AI, and I bet there are other models that can too. So, it's just a question of "do we have the will to automate this" and "can we afford to?" Not "is it possible" that ship has sailed. Basically, despite tons of people saying, "look it's slowing down" every few months some new thing that we thought was impossible gets handled automatically.

So what does the future look like? What jobs are safe? Hilariously, I used to think that pilot would be one of the first to go, but actually I think it'll be one of the ones that takes awhile to go because it's hugely expensive to certify a new airplane. In the next 10 years we will likely see some sort of pilot optional airbus (and definitely a single-pilot one), but the bureaucratic inertia is pretty high. Eventually, if it's cheap enough though, all things get made redundant - whether that happens in our lifetime or not is uncertain, but I definitely see it as plausible. I reckon things will be like this:

Now (2025) - Models continue to get better.

2030 - Models are really good, massive unemployment in previously thought to be unassailable positions, the white collar work that is left is in things that require a license or companies/jobs that haven't made the switch yet. Dispatchers are probably still around, but I suspect that there will be a lot less of them if you can have 1 dispatcher work 40 flights whereas in 2025 you could only work 10 flights (I don't actually know about this - I'm not a DX and don't know what's allowed/legal/etc.). But basically, expect the job market in all white collar roles to shrink, expect major breakthroughs from very tired looking scientists in many different fields. It will be cool, scary, fun, and seem millenarian all at once. Robots are starting to show up "in the wild" at this point (maybe earlier). The big bottlenecks are physical raw materials and electricity, not anything else. Maybe we get UBI? Or something like that?

2035 and beyond - Robots replace increasingly complex blue collar roles. Value of labor is falling rapidly - as is the cost of consumer goods - we likely have robots building robots that can construct new robot factories by then.

So, what the hell am I doing? Well, this is part of the reason I bought land in the woods in south central Alaska. I'm going to build myself my off-grid paradise down there, and happily watch all this happen. That and run my own little hobby business. But in a world where you can spool up 30 smart AIs to solve a problem for you for $25/mo, even if they do kind of a bad job it's worth it. Expect increasing adoption of AI.
 
There is already software being developed that utilizes AI and the airlines are going to want the cost savings it brings with the theoretical reduced workload. WSI Fusion is being replaced with Maverick Dispatch that has AI built into it. CAE is working on AI tools and that technology will eventually make it to FPM (lol), Flightkeys is rumored to be working on some AI features. I do not see an OCC without a dispatcher, but I do see an OCC with a dispatcher that just reviews the work, signs off on the release, and only steps in when needed, which would ideally be something like 30% of the time or less.
 
scramjet said:
AI is coming for a lot of jobs. Even jobs we couldn’t have fathomed being automated 10 years ago (law, medicine, and finance spring to mind). The concern is, how can society leverage it in a way that benefits everyone as whole? I realize I’m quickly going down a science fiction rabbit hole that may be implausible, but if labor generally isn’t needed, could we have some Star Trek/Federation-esque post-scarcity utopia or a late stage economic hellscape where the vast majority of the population can’t work. My grasp of macroeconomics is tenuous, but how could an economy sustain itself in a traditional manner that way? More philosophically speaking, in the absence of work, where do we find meaning?
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We already live in a post-scarcity world. Scarcity hasn't driven economics for a while now. Greed does.

This guy's article reads like a bad online university writing assignment.
 
One thing that articles like this seem to keep overlooking is the FAA agreeing to a major policy change. And right now I think their policy is that operational control of a flight can only be shared by a human. I'd be amazed to see them change this anytime soon. I see AI certainly being used as a tool, perhaps reducing OCC workload and causing some job attrition that way, but I'd be amazed if the FAA changes a regulation eliminating a well-established safety position.
 
scramjet said:
AI is coming for a lot of jobs. Even jobs we couldn’t have fathomed being automated 10 years ago (law, medicine, and finance spring to mind). The concern is, how can society leverage it in a way that benefits everyone as whole? I realize I’m quickly going down a science fiction rabbit hole that may be implausible, but if labor generally isn’t needed, could we have some Star Trek/Federation-esque post-scarcity utopia or a late stage economic hellscape where the vast majority of the population can’t work. My grasp of macroeconomics is tenuous, but how could an economy sustain itself in a traditional manner that way? More philosophically speaking, in the absence of work, where do we find meaning?
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I'm willing to bet more on the late stage economic hellscape. A few people are amassing a majority of the wealth and not pumping out back into people. This leads me to believe that the money that is left for the common person will be scarce. AI isn't going to make the Utopia because none of the normal people will be able to afford the services it provides. Things will get cheaper, but it's had to buy stuff when you don't have money because AI took your job.
 
ppragman said:
But in a world where you can spool up 30 smart AIs to solve a problem for you for $25/mo, even if they do kind of a bad job it's worth it.
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Here's the problem that AI will actually face: That's not actually what it costs. No tech company is making money on AI right now. They're actually not even close. They're losing billions a year on it, some are losing billions a quarter. When that money printer stops running, we will find out how useful this stuff really is, really quickly.
 
DaWolf85 said:
Here's the problem that AI will actually face: That's not actually what it costs. No tech company is making money on AI right now. They're actually not even close. They're losing billions a year on it, some are losing billions a quarter. When that money printer stops running, we will find out how useful this stuff really is, really quickly.
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And don't forget that if your electric bill seems higher, it's because all these ai data centers are using more increasing the demand meaning the power companies are raising their rates.
 
DaWolf85 said:
Here's the problem that AI will actually face: That's not actually what it costs. No tech company is making money on AI right now. They're actually not even close. They're losing billions a year on it, some are losing billions a quarter. When that money printer stops running, we will find out how useful this stuff really is, really quickly.
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So, I did research at my job for this as we started to implement some of these tools. The • AI copilot we pay for actually saves us money. Like, I did the study. The demand is basically limitless. I was optimistic before this, but not fully a believer because it seemed absurd... but yeah, right now there are like 4 or 5 companies vying for supremacy and then open source options. It doesn't have to pay off to totally screw over the labor market.

You can believe me or not, but it's all gas no brakes from here on out.
 
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