i sell big data solutions and work with some airlines to architect these kinds of solutions for new innovative use cases. some airlines have actually got some really cool things going and are getting significant returns on it.
i can tell you across the board all the airlines i know of have IT architectures that suffer from decades of band aid solutions. i can't think of any exceptions.
if united is working with real time big data, i haven't heard of it. and the vendor community for this isn't all that big. but i didn't expect UA to be a thought leader in this category. or any other category now that i think about it.