ChatGPT Said the Visa Would Be Accepted. It Wasn't.

An AI asked to protect every passenger connection gave a flawless answer: cancel the flights. Kevin Hightower is Chief Innovation Officer at Cirium, where he leads Propulsion Labs, the company’s innovation group. He and host Alex Brooker, former colleagues at Cirium, discuss Kevin’s path from oceanic air traffic control at Lockheed Martin to Google’s drone delivery program, how AI is changing product development and decision making in aviation, Cirium’s aviation knowledge graph, and the data interoperability problems holding the industry back. What You’ll Learn Automating the routine: Lockheed’s oceanic ATC system let controllers comfortably manage 30 aircraft instead of a busy 7 to 15 by automating conformance checks and altitude probes. The three hour rule: No decision, from buying a car to buying a company, should need more than three hours of actual thought, with data gathering kept separate from thinking. Disposable prototypes: When AI cuts build time from months to days, the discipline shifts to throwing work away instead of defending ideas because of the effort already spent. AI as an accelerant for learning: Early career engineers who use AI to compress years of learning will outpace those who use it only to do an old job faster. Decisions, not dashboards: Most aviation decisions run roughly eight steps, and AI can now carry four or five of them before a human makes the call. The aviation knowledge graph: Aviation data starts with an aircraft and links orders, lessors, schedules, and tail swaps, so connecting it unlocks analysis no single dataset can. Efficiency before safety: AI will speed up flow management and sequencing well before it touches the safety critical systems that keep aircraft separated. The interoperability gap: Multi year, multi million dollar data lake programs rarely deliver usable value, and the real problem is combining data across boundaries while keeping control of it. Time-Stamped Highlights (0:00) Cold open: the AI that cancelled the flights (2:04) A Cessna ride to Embry-Riddle (4:48) "Do you want to kill people or save people?" Choosing air traffic control (6:26) Replacing paper strips over the Pacific (9:17) From Lockheed CTO to a quarter million drone deliveries (13:10) Why there's no one right way to be a product manager (16:22) The three hour decision rule (22:03) Formal testing in five minutes, not a few months (24:42) Fail fast, then fly everyone to Hawaii (32:39) Powering every decision connected to aviation (34:40) Behind the dip: analyzing every turn instead of one (47:17) Why nobody can predict the Charlotte arrival sequence (48:36) Could AI make travel worse for passengers? (54:09) Data interoperability and the $10 million data lake

AI made writing code nearly free, which only matters if code was ever most of the job. In this compilation episode, host Alex Brooker pulls together clips from seven past guests across travel software, airspace infrastructure, airline operations, corporate travel, content, and airline ancillaries who each arrived at the same idea independently. Alex Ragin of Zoftify puts a number on it: code is about 20% of a software product, and the other 80% is domain knowledge, process, and judgment. The episode follows that 80% through edge cases, daily operational disruption, fare construction expertise, and the question of what a product team's job becomes when execution costs almost nothing. What You'll Learn The 20/80 split: Code is roughly 20% of a complex travel system, and the remaining 80% is knowledge of how the business actually works. Vibe coding limits: A simple invoicing app can be vibe coded, but a CRM, ERP, or GDS cannot, because the hard part is specifying behavior rather than writing it. Edge case cost: One modest custom fields feature at Zoftify took about five days of internal and client discussion before it was ready to build. Failure at the seams: Complex systems break at their interfaces and edge cases, not on the happy paths that teams test and load test. No standard day: In airline operations, disruption from weather, aircraft swaps, or system faults is the normal state rather than the exception. Expertise outside the code: International fare specialists routinely beat GDS pricing engines by thousands of dollars by knowing where to break a fare. Where value moves: As development costs approach zero, advantage shifts to network effects, knowledge of customer pain, and position in the customer journey. The new job: When execution is cheap, deciding what to build and why becomes the core work for every team, not just well funded ones.

Two euros can decide who wins a metasearch sale. Inside most airlines, moving them is still revenue management's call, and it is rarely fast.

Everyone is racing to build the AI agent that books your trip, and nobody is building the thing that makes it safe to use one.

Airlines have spent decades making you earn loyalty through repetition. Iñaki Uriz builds the opposite: you pay first, and the relationship starts before you have flown a single mile. Iñaki Uriz is co-founder and CEO of Caravelo, the platform behind flight subscription products at airlines including Wizz Air and JetSmart. He and Alex Brooker cover how subscribers behave once they have committed, the COVID moment that made Caravelo bet the company on subscriptions, why corporate travel is next, and why Uriz expects AI fare comparison to push airlines towards private deals that sit outside anything an agent can search. What You'll Learn Subscriptions vs loyalty: Loyalty programmes make customers prove commitment before rewarding them. Subscriptions take the financial commitment up front and reward it immediately, and can front load status for the higher tiers. Where the incremental revenue comes from: Unused credits (subscribers use 70 to 80% of packaged flights), new demand created by the subscription itself, and market share, because a subscriber stops searching competitors. The number that matters: For every $100 of subscription revenue, $30 to $50 is money the airline would not otherwise have captured, consistently across customers. Churn benchmarks: Monthly churn runs 3 to 4%, so roughly two thirds of subscribers renew for a second year at no acquisition cost. The second wallet effect: Because the subscription was paid at the start of the cycle, a $50 upsell at booking time feels like $50 rather than $200, which lifts ancillary attachment on planned trips. Two products for two problems: The flight subscription suits an airline chasing market share on a route or region. The last minute pass sells unlimited access to distressed inventory inside a short booking window, which helps flatten a seasonal demand curve. First mover advantage is structural: A subscriber leaves the market. The airline that signs them first keeps them until they actively unsubscribe. The corporate long tail: Only a Bank of America can negotiate a bespoke deal with Delta. Prepackaged subscription tiers give a 300 person firm the same trade: better terms in exchange for exclusivity. AI raises the stakes on price transparency: As agents get better at comparing every public fare against travel policy, a subscriber has already opted out of the comparison, and a private subscription deal is not something an agent can find. Execution is no longer scarce: Uriz on running a company through three years of AI: the work has shifted from producing slides, code and spreadsheets to deciding what to produce and why. Time-Stamped Highlights (0:00) The Mark Cuban lifetime flight pass cold open (1:17) Subscriptions explained like you're five (2:53) How this is different from a loyalty programme (5:49) The economics of 24 flights a year, breakage, and $30 to $50 incremental per $100 (9:17) Does the incremental revenue effect plateau, and retailing on top of a relationship (13:48) Founding story: pre-COVID product testing and the pivot that saved the company (16:56) Why subscription launches make headlines and then quietly disappear (19:39) Two products: the flight subscription vs the last minute distressed inventory pass (21:50) Regional subscription tiers: the Wizz Air network by country example (27:19) Churn and renewal benchmarks against the broader subscription economy (31:05) The second wallet effect and ancillary upsell behaviour (32:00) Corporate travel as the next growth vector, and democratising the Bank of America deal (36:44) AI's current and future impact on airline distribution (39:32) A relationship based moat that AI comparison can't reach (43:00) Execution is no longer the scarce thing: sketches, Claude Design and deciding what to build (47:23) Closing reflections: the frustration and pull of working in aviation Where to find Caravelo