The challenge
To reach certain destinations, airline passengers may need to book connecting flights that may be operated by different airlines. Without airline alliances to faciliate these “interline” flights among participating member carriers, passengers would be required to book each flight separately and transfer their baggage themselves. However, this process is not entirely seamless for the passenger, due to limitations resulting from the archaic nature of airline booking and departure control systems.
Our solution
As a founding member of the oneworld digital team, I helped design and implement a software product intended to help address these technical limitations by offering a set of APIs enabling participating airlines to exchange information and facilitate certain transactions in a secure, efficient manner.
While any two airlines could potentially exchange data through existing or new APIs, this platform establishes a common “hub,” enabling each participating carrier to access every other carrier using one set of APIs with mutually agreed-upon schemas. The platform not only utilizes a robust security model to restrict access to only authorized parties, but also establishes controls on the specific data elements to be exchanged, thereby enabling airlines to maintain control over their proprietary or sensitive information.
The platform is mostly written in NodeJS, utilizes a fully services-oriented architecture, and is entirely cloud-based.
My role
As a member of the fully Agile, multi-disciplinary, self-organizing product development team, I participate in all aspects of product development including design, systems architecture, and coding. I also helped facilitate initial requirements-gathering sessions with airline stakeholders, and have traveled to Doha, Madrid, Sydney, London and Dallas to train carrier developers and support product adoption.
Industrial innovations