Originally Posted by
rybob1
What was interesting to me was that shortly after it launched, a friend of mine who works for one of the big 4 airlines in their IT department, was sent up to Seattle for a training on developing for the original surface. After talking to him he told me that they were looking at deploying surface for their flight ops center. That's all he could or would say about it, but it sure got me curious how exactly it would be used in flight ops. Would be curious if they actually ever deployed it or not. Because of how coy he was being about sharing their plans, I won't say which airline, although it probably doesn't matter at this point.
When i saw it, i was consulting for an IT vendor within the defence industry. They were using it for C4I stuff and it was literally like playing a Red Alert game (for those of you who ever saw that).
I would assume an airline would use it to automate much of the process of route management. You get a big map of the world and specify what aircraft type can fly each route, and Surface then assigns specific aircraft and route plans and sends out notifiers to whoever needs them. It's all on a interactive map so you can see where everything you own is at any time, and you could in theory take out an aircraft due to tech issues/delays and Surface will make the necessary adjustments.