How new AI platform will cut airline disruption costs up to 30%

Airlines around the world will now have access to the most advanced and proven AI-enabled disruption management platform in airline operations.

Disruption is aviation’s most expensive unsolved problem, costing airlines tens of billions of dollars every year. To address this, SITA has acquired Big Blue Analytics, the team behind OCC Assistant Manager (OCCam), and will scale the platform to airlines worldwide as the foundation of a broader Intelligent Operations Control Centre vision.

OCCam is an AI-enabled disruption optimisation platform, developed and proven within live airline operations. When disruption hits, it evaluates every active constraint together – aircraft, crew, passenger itineraries, maintenance – and produces a single, coherent recovery plan in minutes. In production, airlines using OCCam have cut disruption costs up to 30 percent. The starting point, not the ceiling.

Solving disruption is genuinely hard. Aircraft, crew, passengers and maintenance all have to be optimised together, under constant change, against airline priorities that shift by the hour. For years, no system has done this well enough to deliver consistent, feasible outcomes fast enough.

Most tools today work in sequence. Reassign the aircraft. Find legal crew. Rebook passengers. Every step creates rework, and small problems cascade. Controllers and duty managers carry that pressure in real time, making the right call fast, in a system that is already stretched.

This drives cost. For a mid-size carrier operating just over 100 aircraft, disruption costs can reach between US$70M-$80M. A 25-30 percent reduction translates into US$20M-$30M. Yet most systems cannot deliver these savings, and they cannot prove them.

OCCam solves both problems. First, it breaks the sequential decision-making process.

Teams rapidly receive ranked, feasible recovery plans that optimise aircraft, crew and passengers together, with a clear view of cost, on-time performance, passenger impact and compliance.

Second, it makes the impact measurable. Every decision is tracked, allowing airlines to quantify savings, evaluate operational performance and demonstrate a clear return from day one.

“Airlines have traditionally treated disruption as a fixed cost of doing business, but there is a clear opportunity to approach it differently. In an increasingly volatile and fast-moving environment, the ability to recover with the same agility becomes critical.

“The airlines that act on this first will recover faster, fly more, and protect more revenue than those that wait, and AI-enabled tools like OCCam are making that possible,” said David Lavorel, CEO of SITA.

SITA already delivers solutions such as SITA Mission Watch to more than 100 Operations Control Centres worldwide, helping airlines monitor and optimise their operations.

It has also demonstrated its ability to scale AI-enabled products in airline operations. Following the successful global rollout of SITA OptiFlight, the same approach will now bring OCCam to airlines worldwide.