Airline software transitions are mission-critical: safety, efficiency, and the passenger experience all ride on the switch from legacy systems to new platforms.
Aviation Week spoke with Peter Harun, Director of Solution Delivery for Flightscape, about how automation, cloud technology, and disciplined change management move airlines from strategy to a successful go-live without disrupting operations.
Aviation Week: What role does Flightscape’s implementation and delivery organization play in helping customers navigate digital transformation initiatives?
Peter Harun: Digital transformation in this industry is more than deploying new software. These are mission-critical processes that affect safety, operational efficiency, productivity, and the customer experience. The real challenge isn’t the technology itself; it’s integrating it into existing operations and getting it adopted by the organization. At Flightscape, our solutions delivery team acts as a bridge between strategy and execution. And while we do business process assessments, solution design, integration work, and validation, user adoption is where we focus most. Much of my team has hands-on operations control center experience, paired with engineers who understand the software landscape. We lead the workshops, handle the data, and stay with the customer from day one through cutover and beyond.
AW: How are automation, cloud technologies, and modern delivery practices changing the way airline software is implemented and adopted?
PH: Airline software implementations used to be manual, heavily customized projects. The cloud and automation are changing that by shifting operational risk onto us—we handle the scalability, computing power, and reliability, which also speeds up how fast we can innovate. Automation now drives a lot of our validation work. Where quality checks used to be manual spot checks, we can now run an airline’s entire flight schedule from the past month through our system with a single click and confirm everything is compliant. We’re applying the same approach to regression testing. AI is where we see the biggest opportunity to accelerate timelines—getting documentation and integration readiness to about 80-percent accuracy in a fraction of the time, so we can get users into the system faster and iterate from there.
AW: What are the most common integration hurdles airlines face, and how does Flightscape help address them?
PH: The biggest challenge usually comes down to how interconnected these systems already are. A scheduling change, for example, ripples into crew, pay, and flight planning. We need clear documentation of existing business processes and integration points, and sometimes customers have limited technical resources, or they depend on third-party systems whose original architects are long gone, so we end up reverse-engineering. We mitigate that with discovery and design workshops up front, plus ongoing technical checkpoints throughout the project. We’ve also invested heavily in reusable frameworks and middleware for the third-party systems airlines commonly use, so the connections are already proven. It’s a partnership: the technology matters, but so does the collaboration.
AW: Beyond the technology itself, what factors are most critical to a successful implementation, and how do you help customers manage organizational change throughout the process?
PH: Technology projects succeed only when people adopt them. That takes strong executive sponsorship, engaged business and IT stakeholders, real governance, and a structured approach to change management—that last piece is the heaviest lift. Airlines often run the same system for 10 to 15 years, so we bring users in very early, even though it means pulling them off the floor for testing while they’re keeping flights running. A bad first impression spreads fast, so we invest in smooth validation activities, genuine feedback rather than box-checking, and clear criteria for each testing and cutover milestone. If I had to name one factor above the rest, it’s engaged business stakeholders. They need to understand early that the new system won’t mirror every old workflow, but that the efficiency gains are worth the change.
AW: Looking ahead, what technologies and industry trends do you believe will have the greatest impact on airline operations and the future of software implementation?
PH: You can’t have this conversation without talking about AI. It’s going to become embedded in operational decision-making—helping airlines customize schedules, predict disruptions, and helping dispatchers and controllers resolve issues faster with AI-driven insights. We’re only at the beginning of that. Second is platform connectivity. The cloud makes it far easier to connect systems and bring in variables you couldn’t combine before, like disruption management alongside fuel pricing. Third is automation: manual testing, validation, and data consistency work is becoming much more intelligent and predictive. That’s exactly where we’re investing: building middleware to reduce integration complexity, using automation to test far more in far less time, and using AI to accelerate documentation and evaluation. It all points toward more successful implementations and faster time to value.
About the Expert
Peter Harun is Director of Solution Delivery for Flightscape, where he leads global programs implementing and evolving mission-critical airline operations platforms for major international carriers.
