Business aviation runs genuinely cutting-edge technology in some corners, and processes that haven't changed since 2009 sitting right next to it. Both are often true at the same operator, sometimes in the same building.
That gap is what I want to dig into on June 16.
I'm on the panel "Digital Transformation in Business Aviation: Where Do We Stand?" at the Elite Wings Aviation Summit in Montreal. Tuesday, June 16, 1:30 PM, at Le Mount Stephen. Shaan Bhanji from FlyFast Air is moderating, and I'm joined by Jean De Looz of MySky, Anthony Haries of NovaJet, and Constantine Tsokas of Chartright.
This comes a few days after I spoke at the CBAA Innovation Stage in Calgary, on a talk called "Stop Renting Your Software. Build It with AI." Same core argument, different format. At CBAA I had the stage to myself for half an hour. At EWAS I get to make the case next to operators and a SaaS vendor who'll push back, which is more useful.
Here's the honest read on where the industry stands. Almost everyone is "doing digital." That's not the interesting question anymore. The interesting question is the gap between buying a tool and the tool actually working, with someone on staff still retyping the same data between three systems that will never talk to each other.
Aviation got the worst SaaS deal in business, and not by accident. The market is small. Vendors build something generic, charge a premium, and price per seat, so the bill scales up against your own growth. Operators didn't underspend on technology out of timidity. The honest return on renting generic tools was just bad. That math changed.
What changed is the cost of building software that fits you exactly. It dropped by something like 10 to 100x. For thirty years building your own was a rich company's game, so you rented. That's no longer the constraint. The scarce ingredient was never the code. It was the domain knowledge, the way your dispatchers actually think and your real quoting logic, and operators have owned that all along. At ForIT, that build-versus-buy call is most of what I do for operators.
I'm not going to pretend this is frictionless. You still need one capable technical person to steer it and own it, and plenty of "AI" pitches aimed at this industry are vapor. So I'll bring proof instead of enthusiasm. A Minimum Equipment List, primarily AI-written, that Transport Canada approved after two rounds of review. Regulated, safety-critical, and it cleared. When the bar is the regulator's and not mine, the question stops being whether AI can be trusted with serious aviation work and becomes what you build first.
If you're at EWAS, come to the panel and bring the hard questions. The operators in the room describing where their tools fail is worth more than any of us asserting it from the stage.
This is for operators who are tired of bending their company to fit software somebody else built for a market that was never really theirs. If you're looking for a digital transformation deck full of buzzwords, that's not what I do, and this isn't the panel for it.
Benjamin Thomas
ForIT Team
