With over two decades of direct operational experience spanning airlines, airports and ground handling companies, I have identified systemic challenges that persist across the aviation industry, regardless of business model, scale or geography. These universal patterns serve as the strategic foundation for our accelerator program.
Most of the software challenges airlines face are not unique to that airline. The same check-in bottlenecks appear at different airports. The same compliance gaps show up in maintenance documentation. The same scheduling inefficiencies recur in crew rostering. The same fraud exposure sits inside indirect distribution. Aviation companies experience these as their specific problems.
Most of the time, when an aviation company comes to us with a software problem, the first thing I check is whether we have already solved it somewhere else. More often than not, we have.
What is an accelerator?
An accelerator is not a product you buy and deploy as-is. It is a set of components that we have already built, tested and validated in live operational environments, designed to solve specific, recurring problems. You take those components, customise them to your operation, your systems and your specific requirements, and integrate them into what you already have running.
An accelerator typically reduces development time by 30 to 40 percent compared to building from scratch.
The analogy we use is aircraft manufacturing. Boeing does not design every 737 from scratch. They use proven designs and customise them for each airline. Our accelerators work the same way.
What this means in practice is that you skip the part of a software project that takes the most time without producing anything: figuring out how to solve a problem that is already understood. The architecture is validated, the components are tested and the integration approach is known. What remains is the work that is genuinely specific to your airline, which is where engineering time should go.
And because the components are modern by design, they integrate alongside your existing infrastructure without requiring you to take anything offline. The legacy system keeps running, and the new capability adds what was missing.
You cannot take an airline offline to upgrade it. That constraint shapes everything about how we build.
The accelerators we have built
Each of these came from real operational situations across the airlines and aviation businesses we work with.
1. Passenger Check-in
Fixed check-in desks create bottlenecks during peak times and sit idle during lulls, while desk rental costs and equipment fees at multiple airport locations stay constant. Legacy departure control systems are increasingly difficult for younger staff to learn, creating recruitment pressure. When a system failure or cyberattack hits, airlines with fixed infrastructure lose the ability to process passengers entirely.
The check-in accelerator enables agents to process passengers from anywhere on airport premises using mobile devices, connected to your existing DCS or running standalone. It handles the full check-in workflow including seat selection, baggage and special service requests, with multiple integrations and CUTE/CUPPS certification for traditional desk operations alongside mobile flexibility.
2. Group Check-in
Group bookings, defined as nine people and above, typically account for around 10 percent of all passenger bookings, and most airlines still handle these passengers through manual airport check-in. There are limited or no online options, limited flexibility for individual passengers, no automated notifications and missed ancillary revenue throughout.
See also: [Case Study] Digitising Airline Group Check-In with a Custom Accelerator
The group check-in accelerator enables digital check-in for entire groups, with each group member completing their own process online, integrated upsell opportunities during check-in, and GDPR-compliant data handling. It eliminates the airport bottleneck without requiring the group to move as a single unit.
3. Boarding
Fixed gate scanners create the same structural problem as fixed check-in desks: single points of failure, no flexibility when gate assignments change and manual verification that slows boarding during peak periods.
The boarding accelerator turns any mobile device into a boarding pass scanner supporting IATA Version 8 digital boarding passes. Real-time boarding management tracks yet-to-board passengers automatically without relying on fixed gate infrastructure.
4. Aircraft Maintenance
Paper-based sign-off procedures create administrative overhead and compliance risk. Maintenance records sit across multiple systems. Technicians spend time on documentation rather than maintenance work. Certification verification is manual and audit preparation is time-consuming.
The MRO accelerator replaces paper with a mobile-first digital sign-off system designed for hangar environments, with automated certification validation that prevents unauthorised personnel from approving tasks, full integration with existing MRO and CAMS systems and an immutable digital audit trail that satisfies FAA, EASA and international aviation standards. Every task is traceable from the technician who performed it to the certification that authorised it.
5. Crew Scheduling
Manual roster creation takes an average of 50 or more hours of scheduler time per month per base. Regulatory compliance validation, rest period tracking, duty hour limits and certification matching are all done manually. Per diem calculations are error-prone. Balancing operational efficiency with crew preferences is difficult to do consistently at scale.
See also: [Case Study] Automating and Optimizing Icelandair’s Per Diem Crew Payroll
The crew scheduling accelerator uses AI-powered optimisation to generate rosters based on your specific operational criteria and regulatory constraints, not generic aviation rules. It encodes your collective bargaining agreements, your labour law requirements, and connects with your existing flight operations and HR systems. The solution sits on your own infrastructure with no subscription or rental fees, and the intellectual property belongs to you.
6. Lounge Management
Eligible lounge passengers have tripled over the past decade. Most facilities still validate access manually. Eligibility rules around code-share agreements, alliance benefits and frequent flyer programmes change constantly, which leads to access errors, billing disputes and delayed invoicing.
The lounge management accelerator automates access eligibility validation using AI-powered rule generation that reads contracts and creates rules automatically, with real-time capacity monitoring and surge prediction, automated invoicing and charge-back processing and a single platform supporting barcode, QR, card reader, and manual entry. It removes the manual workload between a passenger arriving at the lounge and an accurate invoice being generated.
7. Fraud in Indirect Distribution
Every year, airlines absorb fraud losses they cannot trace, cannot measure accurately and cannot stop without disrupting legitimate business. The root cause is structural: when a booking routes through an aggregator, the selling agency's identity arrives as unverified metadata. There is no cryptographic proof of who originated the transaction, which means fraud response is blunt and costly. Blocking one bad actor means blocking an entire aggregator channel.
The fraud prevention accelerator embeds cryptographic identity verification directly into the distribution layer. Every transaction carries a verifiable proof of who initiated it: the specific agency behind the aggregator, the individual agent at the desktop, the traveller at booking. Identity is verified at the point of transaction, not after the fact. It works across NDC, GDS, and direct connect channels without rebuilding your existing distribution infrastructure. Once an agency or agent is verified, that identity is reused across transactions, which reduces friction for partners and reduces administrative overhead for the airline.
