Aviation operations rely on expert teams executing quickly and effectively: maintenance, customer service, scheduling, and crew all shape customer experience and loyalty. But under pressure, the decisions made inside individual teams can have cascading impact across the network.
Kubrick Managing Director Jila Bahri-Esfahani sat down with airline and airport leaders to explore when disruption hits. They examined the chain of interdependent structural, communication, and data challenges that make aviation operations reactive instead of optimized. By closing the gaps between these challenges, they can give teams the ownership to do what they do best.
Under pressure, tradeoffs are a given — aren’t they?
Most industries are learning to plan in shorter time frames. Retailers who once set supply chains months out are making more adjustments to pricing, routing, and suppliers day by day. Manufacturers who used to lock in decisions weeks ahead now make them in hours. Tariff wars, shipping disruption, and fuel shocks have compressed planning horizons across the board. For many organizations, managing the tradeoffs between quality, availability, and pricing is new, uncomfortable, and has real consequences for their brand and customers.
But for airlines and airports, this always-on decision making has been a long-standing part of their model. Aging fleets, weather, shared flight paths, and crowded runways mean a single fault can cascade across the network. Routes and schedules planned months in advance are subject to constant tradeoffs. Where other industries are being forced to shrink their planning windows, aviation’s window was already close to zero.
That’s what makes the coordination problem so costly. The tradeoffs that happen in an instant — swapping aircraft tails, reassigning seats — mean teams can end up inadvertently working against each other. These frictions along the chain of operations compound to lost productivity, revenue, and customer experience along the way.
So, we asked airline and airport leaders: when good teams end up working against each other, where does the friction actually start? It presented three lines of enquiry: operating models, communication, and data; not as separate problems, but as interconnected dependencies.
Aviation operations start with incentives
Maintenance focuses on the task in front of it. Planning protects the schedule. Sales optimizes capacity. Customer service absorbs the fallout of overbooking. Each team’s incentives make sense in isolation until disruption forces a tradeoff between them.
An operations team measured on minimizing delays will pull any available crew for a tight turnaround. A scheduling team measured on crew utilization has already assigned that same staff elsewhere. Both teams are doing their jobs correctly, but the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are pointed in different directions; airlines prioritize on-time performance, even at the expense of lost luggage – but customer experience feels the fall out when trying to protect brand reputation and loyalty. Often when target outcomes conflict, both teams can end up missing their goal.
In our discussion, leaders from across the aviation ecosystem called out competing KPIs as the hidden exacerbator behind delays. When teams are highly dependent on each other, like maintenance and planning, they require jointly owned outcomes to pull in the same direction. They need cross-functional processes to identify where the handoffs need to happen between teams. A shared metric on aircraft-on-ground recovery time, for example, ties both teams to how fast an aircraft gets back into rotation — not just whether the fault was fixed correctly or the schedule was protected.
As airlines compete for new routes and new customers, operating at full utility will demand shared responsibility more than ever.
There’s a communication problem for handoffs
Even with shared objectives, the handoffs between areas in critical operations present their own risks. When operations and planning are both racing to find a regulatory-compliant crew swap, any gap in how they communicate widens.
Part of this is a language gap, a cultural difference between how different teams view the operation. When evaluating a delay, a pilot will monitor air traffic and incoming weather. The operations team is tracking when crew members times out of their shift. Maintenance crews jot acronyms in paper logs while planners work from digital systems. They are sharing all types of information – sometimes relevant to each other, sometimes not – in a variety of formats that aren’t always compatible.
Part of it is generational: leaders described how longer-serving staff are wedded to their email systems and resistant to app-based tools, while the incoming generation have the inverse. Hand-held alert lands instantly with one generation and gets missed entirely by another. The communication challenge for aviation operations is technological, cultural, and behavioral all at once. It’s why bolting on a new tool rarely fixes it.
The KPI and communication challenges have a common enemy: fragmented data
Misaligned incentives and shaky handoffs share a root cause: there’s difficulty pinpointing a single source of truth feeding either one. When organizations invest in centralizing data, leveraging modern data platforms to migrate data into one place or connecting multiple sources, they create the foundation to interpret every team’s needs. They can illuminate the unseen dependencies, risks, and opportunities of different functions on overall performance and use these connections to inform joint KPIs that incentivize stronger collaboration.
AI is the translation layer when data is brought together. It breaks the game of telephone where information gets lost or arrives in the wrong format: a delay notification as an app alert for one team, an email with the right acronyms for another.
And it can add a longer-term view that no single team has the vantage point to see on their own. Swapping a tail might be the fastest fix for a delay but creates a risk of losing luggage along the way. AI that reads where tails, gate numbers, and baggage carousels intersect can flag that risk and evaluate the overall cost. When organizations focus on centralizing data in modern platforms, they can spot and act upon interdependencies across processes and systems and uncover the joint KPIs that lead to new efficiencies.
How shared visibility enhances resilience
Aviation is already about as reactive and resilient as an industry can get. And as a highly regulated industry, the ability to trust data to remain compliant is a criticality, not a luxury. The flow of information is a fundamental necessity for all players to operate effectively within multiple networks, and organizations are data-rich; although much remains fragmented. By unifying, codifying and leveraging data, organizations broaden the horizon to make evidence-based decisions and anticipate patterns that make tangible differences to revenue and operational cost.
Instead, widening the horizon for decision-making buys back the room to plan that aviation has never had. More time means more opportunities for growth. With a wider lens, you learn more about the routes, customer experiences, and pricing decisions that drive revenue and strengthen the P&L.
Herein lies the opportunity to harness shared data and joint ownership and build an operating model where every team is focused on the same runway.
