Odysee CEO Steve Casley sees dollar signs in data. Or more specifically, AI-powered software that can analyze reams of data to help commercial airlines get the most out of its complex flight schedules. Odysee, the first startup born out of an aviation-focused venture lab formed by Alaska Airlines and UP.Labs, is doing just that. The two companies formed the venture lab last year to create startups designed to address specific issues in aviation travel, such as guest experiences, operational efficiency, aircraft maintenance, routing, and revenue management. Odysee said it has raised $5m in a pre-seed round led by UP.Partners, the Los Angeles-based VC firm that is connected to UP.Labs. Alaska Star Ventures, which launched in October 2021, invested $15m into UP.Partners’ inaugural early-stage fund. Alaska Airlines CEO Ben Minicucci flagged scheduling as an issue early on, according to Casley. And it’s no wonder. While there is software that provides flight data analysis and scheduling, Casley argues they all lack the kind of real-time time and — critically — revenue predictions that Odysee is building. “You need some tools to make better decisions, because typically across airlines, schedule changes are made by planners with experience that do it by intuition,” Casley said in a recent interview. “I wouldn't say the seat of their pants, because a good portion of the time they're going to be right because they've seen bad changes and good. But they never really had the data to back up those decisions.”<br/>
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Australia’s federal court has formally ordered Qantas to pay A$100m ($67.3m) in penalties for advertising and selling tickets on flights that it eventually decided to cancel. The court order, announced 8 October, comes about five months after Qantas and Australia’s competition watchdog – which had sued the airline over its “misleading” conduct – agreed to settle with a A$100m civil penalty imposed. According to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), Qantas had “benefitted” from misleading its customers. The commission says Qantas’ senior managers - who were responsible for the airline’s systems and operations were “aware” that the cancelled flights were not removed from sale, but did not act on it. Qantas had also admitted that existing ticketholders for these cancelled flights were not immediately notified or updated. Adds the ACCC: “Qantas admitted that it benefited from the conduct by obtaining revenue from consumers who may have chosen a cheaper Qantas flight or a flight with another carrier had they known their chosen flight had already been cancelled.” The so-called ‘ghost flights’ controversy happened between May 2021 and July 2022, with the ACCC mounting its lawsuit in August 2023. In total, the commission says Qantas advertised tickets for over 8,000 cancelled flights. Qantas originally rebutted the claims, stating that the ACCC’s lawsuit ignored “the realities” of the airline sector, particularly during the challenging coronavirus pandemic. However, by May this year, it decided to settle for the A$100m penalty, in addition to A$20m in restitution for 86,000 passengers who bought tickets on the cancelled flights.<br/>
The Australian airline Qantas is apologizing after a recent flight from Sydney to Haneda Airport in Tokyo featured an R-rated movie shown on every screen. And, according to online comments from people who said they were passengers on the flight, the movie could not be turned off. The crew played the movie following the malfunction of personal in-flight entertainment systems last week, according to a person who recounted the flight experience on Reddit. The user added that the film, which features sexually explicit language, images and words displayed on the screen, played for almost an hour before it was shut off. “It was super uncomfortable for everyone, especially with families and kids onboard,” the user wrote. “How is this acceptable for a major airline?” Qantas said in a statement that the crew chose the movie “based on the request from a number of passengers.” Neither the Reddit user nor the airline divulged what was the movie in question, but other media outlets and internet sleuths have identified it as the 2023 film “Daddio,” starring Dakota Johnson and Sean Penn. Set almost entirely inside a New York City taxicab, the drama explores a chance encounter between a talkative cabdriver and his passenger, as he drives her from Kennedy Airport to Midtown Manhattan. A New York Times review of the film this year noted that their conversations grow more intimate, leading the cabdriver to share a distasteful anecdote about his first wife and his thoughts about what married men want in a mistress, while the passenger is “surreptitiously sexting her tongue-lolling lover.” The Times reported that the film was rated R for “bared breasts and barroom language.”<br/>