It didn’t take very long to figure out that if you replace one $25M plane with 25 $1M planes, it fixes a lot of problems. And if you couple that with doing it by the seat instead of by the plane, that lets you interleave packets, or payloads, and increases the efficiency even more. So it became very clear that we needed to build a large, self-optimizing network that would take a lot of other factors into consideration, like the physics of the airplane, the temperature, the loads. The beauty of aviation is that it’s like physics meets business, right? How much you can carry depends on temperatures, altitudes, runway lengths — and safety is all expressed in terms of parameters that the optimizer has to take into account as it starts shuffling around customers. It’s not a straight optimization, it has to be done in real time, and it has an incredible number of constraints.

fighting the NP-complete fight to give passengers on-demand routing. no more sucky hubs, yay for small airports.

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