Flight disruption is one of aviation's most expensive unsolved problems, costing the industry tens of billions of dollars a year, and SITA is betting that an AI platform proven inside live airline operations can finally put a number on the savings. The air transport technology group has acquired Big Blue Analytics, the team behind OCC Assistant Manager, known as OCCam, and plans to scale it across airlines globally as the foundation of a wider Intelligent Operations Control Center vision.
The scale of the problem is what makes the maths interesting. For a mid-size carrier running just over 100 aircraft, disruption costs can reach between 70 and 80 million dollars. A reduction of a quarter to a third translates into 20 to 30 million dollars, and SITA says airlines already running OCCam in production have cut disruption costs by up to 30 percent.
Most recovery tools work in sequence, reassigning the aircraft, then finding legal crew, then rebooking passengers. Every step creates rework and small problems cascade, while controllers and duty managers carry the pressure in real time. OCCam evaluates every active constraint at once, aircraft, crew, passenger itineraries and maintenance, and returns ranked, feasible recovery plans in minutes, with a view of cost, on-time performance, passenger impact and compliance. It also tracks every decision so airlines can quantify the savings rather than assume them.
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.
The acquisition fits a pattern. SITA already runs products such as SITA Mission Watch in more than 100 operations control centres and rolled out SITA OptiFlight globally, and it has been building a layer of large language models and agent-based systems on top of airline operations. With OCCam's optimisation engine underneath, the company wants systems that predict disruption earlier and automate routine recovery.
With SITA, we can take what we have built further. Reaching more airlines, faster, and turning advanced optimization into practical tools that help operations teams work smarter every day.
Whether the 30 percent figure holds as the platform leaves its proving airlines for SITA's much larger customer base is the question the rollout will answer.
