The aviation industry is under increasing pressure to reduce its environmental footprint while maintaining operational efficiency and cost competitiveness.
For airlines, flight planning directly impacts fuel costs, CO₂ emissions, and regulatory compliance, yet route optimization decisions are still constrained by legacy systems and time-critical operations.
Airlines have limited ability to systematically translate sustainability goals into everyday operational decisions. This leads to missed fuel-saving opportunities, higher operating costs, and slower progress toward climate commitments.
For a flight operations solution provider such as Thales, this creates a clear opportunity to support airlines with tools that integrate seamlessly into dispatchers’ workflows while enabling measurable fuel and emissions optimization, without increasing operational risk.
Flight dispatchers need to plan safe and efficient routes quickly, but existing tools are complex and time-consuming, making it difficult to compare alternatives and incorporate fuel and emissions optimization into everyday decisions.
How can we design a route-planning experience that fits into flight dispatchers’ time-critical workflows while making fuel- and emissions-optimized options easy to understand, compare, and trust?
The results provided the team with a deep understanding of the direct users of their product as well as directions for future deployment. Through the research, I secured international partnership with U.S. based dispatch schools that allowed the team to have access to test users.
Given the safety-critical and time-constrained nature of flight operations, the project followed a user-centered and iterative design approach, grounded in real operational constraints. Early research focused on understanding dispatchers’ workflows, decision-making processes, and trust requirements when evaluating route alternatives.
Rather than introducing radical changes, the design approach prioritized progressive integration into existing tools and habits, ensuring that sustainability considerations could be incorporated without disrupting established practices. Design decisions were continuously validated through iterative prototyping and usability testing, with a strong emphasis on clarity, confidence, and risk mitigation.
This approach ensured that environmental optimization was treated not as an additional task, but as a natural extension of dispatchers’ core responsibilities.
Focused on understanding flight dispatchers’ real-world workflows and decision-making constraints through interviews and scenario walkthroughs with domain experts.
Insights were translated into design principles and explored through iterative low- and high-fidelity prototypes, focusing on decision support and seamless integration into existing tools.
Key design assumptions were validated through iterative usability testing, with refinements driven by feedback on clarity, trust, and cognitive load.
By enabling more efficient route optimization, Airwaze supports a reduction in route length of up to ~1% on selected flights, contributing directly to lower fuel consumption and emissions.
Fuel represents around 30% of an airline’s operating costs. Even marginal fuel savings can therefore translate into significant cost reductions at scale, potentially saving airlines millions of euros annually.
By centralizing relevant parameters and providing a clear visual representation of route options, Airwaze reduces the time dispatchers spend comparing and validating flight plans, enabling faster and more confident decision-making.
By accounting for operational constraints and modernizing the interface, AirWaze improves usability and reduces cognitive load, making dispatchers’ work easier, more efficient, and more meaningful.
Automation accelerates exploration, while human validation safeguards safety and responsibility. It can significantly reduce decision time, but only when users remain in control. In safety-critical environments, automated outputs must be understandable, comparable, and reversible to be trusted.
Trust does not come from automation alone, but from understanding why a recommendation exists.
Environmental impact reduction and cost efficiency reinforce each other instead of competing. Therefore, sustainability initiatives are most effective when they directly support operational and business performance.
This project showed that automation creates the most value when it accelerates decision-making without removing human control. Instead of enforcing an “optimal” route, AirWaze introduces automated route recommendations that are presented as suggestions, displayed alongside the reference route, and fully explorable before validation.
Each recommended route is accompanied by clear performance indicators: fuel impact, emissions, cost-related efficiency, and operational constraints, allowing dispatchers to quickly understand trade-offs, compare alternatives, and make informed decisions under time pressure. By surfacing only the most relevant information, the interface supports confident validation without overwhelming users.
By embedding fuel and emissions optimization directly into this decision flow, rather than isolating it as a separate “green” feature, sustainability becomes a natural outcome of efficient operational choices, aligned with business performance, safety, and accountability.
