Free Route Airspace

Stop Sharing Lessons Learned. Let Teams Build Their Own Prototypes.

Alex Brooker — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 09:32:29 GMT

I read something this week that got under my skin. An article arguing that AI is a headline but collaboration is the real bottleneck. Their thesis: we need to share lessons learned, stop duplicating prototypes across teams, reuse artifacts, and collaborate more effectively.

It sounds entirely reasonable. And I think it’s almost entirely wrong.

When Efficiency Creates More Work: Jevons Paradox and the AI Revolution

Alex Brooker — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 14:15:41 GMT

In 1865, English economist William Stanley Jevons made a counterintuitive observation about coal-powered steam engines. As the engines became more efficient, everyone expected coal demand to drop. Instead, it skyrocketed.

The paradox? Greater efficiency didn’t reduce consumption, it unlocked use cases that had never been economically viable before. Suddenly you could attach a small steam engine to a belt running along your factory ceiling, distributing power to machines across the floor. What was impossible at old efficiency levels became obvious at new ones.

I recently sat down with three people I’ve worked with for over a decade: Ian Painter, Adrian McKenzie, and Oli Deakin, to explore whether this same paradox applies to AI and knowledge work. We built and sold Snowflake Software together, growing it into an aviation analytics business that was eventually acquired. Now we’re all watching AI reshape the very industries we spent years building.

The conversation that followed was one of the most honest discussions I’ve had about what’s actually happening, beyond the hype and the fear.

The Identity Crisis Nobody’s Talking About

Adrian, now a director of technology, opened with something that stuck with me. He’s watching his engineering teams respond to AI tools in two very different ways.

Some engineers are struggling to adapt. Not because they can’t learn the tools, but because their identity is wound up in how they write code. The quality of their code is who they are. When AI changes how that code gets written, it feels like an attack on their sense of self.

Others see AI purely as a faster path to customer outcomes. They don’t care how the code gets produced, they care that it works and delivers value. For them, AI is just another accelerant.

This isn’t a skills gap. It’s an identity gap. And it’s happening across every knowledge profession right now.

The 80% Problem

Oli, who served as CTO alongside us, raised something that anyone who’s used Copilot or Claude for coding will recognise instantly.

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Why Aviation’s AI Revolution Needs a Security Wake-Up Call

Alex Brooker — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 16:01:49 GMT

The aviation industry is embracing AI for good reason. Large Language Models can finally make sense of the messy, multi-format data landscape we’ve been wrestling with for decades. From cryptic NOTAMs to scanned maintenance records to real-time operational messages. The potential is genuinely transformational: unlocking insights buried in years of safety data, reducing pilot workload, accelerating maintenance intelligence.

These applications will be adopted because the accuracy, financial and operational benefits are too significant to ignore.

But there’s a problem we need to talk about: prompt injection.

How much does AI actually know about Airport operations?

Alex Brooker — Thu, 13 Mar 2025 16:59:41 GMT

Since I launched the pre-flight benchmark concept at the Royal Aeronautical Society late last year there has been substantial progress in AI. The Chinese team from Deepseek shocked the West with a new reasoning model, which was then released as Open Source. Using a “thinking aloud” step before arriving at an answer, along with novel training techniques,…

Raw signals into decisions

Alex Brooker — Wed, 26 Feb 2025 12:35:34 GMT

Every second, thousands of aircraft crisscross our skies, each generating gigabytes of data from hundreds of sensors, systems, and interactions. This constant digital pulse, comprising everything from flight paths and weather conditions to passenger bookings and maintenance logs represents one of the most complex data ecosystems on the planet.

Perhaps be…

Ground Effect

Alex Brooker — Mon, 20 Jan 2025 12:03:37 GMT

The aviation industry stands at a juncture with generative AI, facing both opportunities and significant challenges. As presented at the Royal Aeronautical Society in November 2024, our systematic evaluation of AI's capabilities in aviation reveals a nuanced landscape where the technology's effectiveness varies dramatically across different use cases.

Th…

A review: The UK's AI Opportunities Action Plan

Alex Brooker — Tue, 14 Jan 2025 16:41:36 GMT

The UK government has just released its AI Opportunities Action Plan, and having reviewed it in detail, I see both promising directions and areas that warrant careful consideration. I'd like to help, here are my thoughts:

🛫 What's Encouraging: The plan repeatedly recognises procurement as a key lever for change. This is significant - current procureme…

I'm building an AI benchmark, who's with me?

Alex Brooker — Thu, 03 Oct 2024 10:51:54 GMT

TL;DR: I’m building an awesome, crowd sourced, peer reviewed, open aviation AI benchmark.

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Learning about generative AI, Large Language Models (and vision) has been a lot of fun in the last few years. I have navigated unsuccessfully from London to Singapore with Czech in the 30’s….

I’ve tried to fly North to Vegas with Bonanza Airlines in the 1950’s….

There are five people in a room...

Alex Brooker — Fri, 13 Sep 2024 09:22:03 GMT

Large Language Models (LLMs) are incredible. In my whole career I have never been so energised and excited by a technology development. So excited in fact, that I quit my job and ran around Trafalgar Square shouting. One of those things is true.

Generative AI has already demonstrated remarkable capabilities in various applications. If we froze the progr…

The EOS (Entrepreneurial Operating System)

Alex Brooker — Tue, 03 Sep 2024 13:51:27 GMT

I was sceptical at first. At Snowflake Software between 2014 and 2017 everyone in the Leadership Team had tried to reformat the weekly management meeting to no avail. After a few weeks of enthusiasm, similar issues consistently emerged:

Not enough time to gather the right data or prep
Meeting minutes and decisions were not documented in time
Senior leaders…

It's 1974 and you're flying to Singapore. Can Claude.ai help?

Alex Brooker — Tue, 20 Aug 2024 16:22:16 GMT

Imagine it's 1974. You're in London, desperate to get back to Singapore, and your travel agent hands you an Aeroflot route map that looks more like a mutant spider's web than a helpful guide. Fast forward half a century: could an AI be your time-traveling travel agent, deciphering this vintage aeronautical puzzle? Join me as we embark on a journey that …

Can GenAI ever be certified in Aviation?

Alex Brooker — Wed, 31 Jul 2024 19:32:47 GMT

This Spring a groundbreaking paper from Anthropic on 'Scaling Monosemanticity' caught my attention. This research from the Anthropic Interpretability team could have far-reaching implications, particularly in the realm of AI explainability - a crucial factor for industries like aviation where safety is paramount. The eighty page paper, and the much more…

Technology Readiness Level 1

Alex Brooker — Wed, 31 Jul 2024 18:20:42 GMT

The first website I ever created was at university in 1998, called cardiffbeats.co.uk. It was a clubbing and dance music website with lists of nightclubs, reviews, links to local record labels, and recommended nights out. I coded the HTML using Adobe PageMill on my Apple iMac paid for by my student loan. The last entry in the update blog was 22 years ag…