Charter Operations Platform

Challenge

Charter operations ran on legacy in-house tooling: manifests, station operations, TSA and CBP compliance touchpoints, no international capability, and heavy manual entry. The replacement had to be a vendor platform selected and contracted from scratch, and it had to stay in lockstep with the flight-ops system of record in both directions while that system was itself being migrated.

Approach

• ▸Ran product analysis, vendor selection, contract negotiation, and procurement; then owned development, beta, and UAT through release.
• ▸Trained 80 users and built the company computer-based training modules.
• ▸Designed the flight-ops sync in MuleSoft: flight creation and OOOI times, booked passengers at T-24h and T-3h, actual passengers on departure, flight status closed on OOOI receipt, reposition and IROP handling, with full MUnit coverage.
• ▸Diagnosed a duplicate-segment defect at its root: charter flights lacked the reservation-level match key the sync relied on. Designed a fallback match key at the flight-ops level that turned erroneous inserts into correct updates.
• ▸Released in stages: dark release and UAT in January 2026, semi-dark in February as a secondary path for agents, passenger counts back to flight ops in March, automatic sync re-enabled in June to remove manual entry, reposition and time-based sync fixes in September.
• ▸Recreated the Flight Inquiry and Operational Analysis reports from platform data so accounting could self-serve; added weekly flight-existence parity checks on both flight-ops paths.
• ▸Scoped the passenger and cargo weight sync to NavBlue flight planning: standard versus non-standard trips, total payload calculation, and re-send triggers.
• ▸After a visit to the merger partner's headquarters, led the relationship, requirements fit, vendor coordination, and internal alignment that secured their agreement to beta the platform for charter operations.

Outcome

• 100% of charter operations on the new platform; delivered under budget.
• 80 users trained; CBTs in place for ongoing onboarding.
• Duplicate-segment defect solved at the match-key level, not patched downstream; manual flight entry removed once automatic sync was restored.
• First cross-carrier adoption of the platform: a merger partner committed to a charter-operations beta, making this the combined carrier's charter platform ahead of integration.