For decades, airline operations have been built on experience. Seniority in the Operations Control Center, years of handling disruptions, an intuitive understanding of how the network behaves under stress. Experience has been the currency of credibility. The more you had seen, the more you were trusted to decide.

That model worked when airline operations were simpler, slower and more forgiving. It does not scale anymore.

Today, relying on experience as the primary decision-making engine is not just insufficient. It is a structural risk.

The traditional belief: experience equals reliability

In most airlines, the most experienced operators are still the ones who carry the heaviest decision-making load. When a major disruption hits, everyone looks to the same people. They are expected to “know what to do” because they have lived through similar situations before.

Experience provides speed, confidence and pattern recognition. These are valuable assets. But they come with a hidden assumption: that the past is a reliable guide to the present.

In modern airline operations, that assumption increasingly fails.

Why the operational context has fundamentally changed

Airline networks today are denser and more interconnected than ever. Aircraft utilization is tighter. Crew rules are more complex. Airports operate closer to capacity. Margins leave little room for error. Disruptions cascade faster and across wider parts of the network.

What worked five or ten years ago often no longer applies:

• Fleet composition has changed.

• Crew agreements have evolved.

• Regulatory pressure has increased.

• Passenger expectations are higher.

• Recovery windows are shorter.

Experience is always contextual. When the context shifts faster than experience can adapt, intuition becomes unreliable.

When experience turns into fragility

One of the most common operational anti-patterns in airlines is the concentration of decision authority around a small group of highly experienced individuals. These people become indispensable. They are the ones who “hold the operation together”.

This creates several risks.

First, it creates bottlenecks. Decisions slow down when everything has to pass through the same few minds.

Second, it creates inconsistency. Different shifts, different people, different outcomes for similar situations.

Third, it creates organizational fragility. When key individuals are unavailable, overloaded or leave the company, operational performance drops sharply. Knowledge walks out the door.

What looks like operational strength is often just unmanaged dependency.

Experience-based decisions are hard to audit and impossible to scale

Another structural issue with experience-driven operations is traceability. Decisions made “because it felt right” are difficult to explain, document or review.

This has consequences:

• Post-event analysis becomes superficial.

• Learning does not scale across the organization.

• Mistakes are repeated under slightly different conditions.

• Accountability becomes blurred.

Without structured decision logic, airlines struggle to improve systematically. They rely on individual memory instead of organizational learning.

Scaling operations under these conditions is nearly impossible.

Systems do not replace experience, they protect it

The answer is not to remove humans from decision-making. That is a false dichotomy. The real shift is from experience as a replacement for systems to experience as an interpreter of systems.

High-performing airlines use structured systems to:

• Centralize operational data.

• Provide shared situational awareness.

• Make trade-offs explicit.

• Reduce cognitive load under pressure.

In this environment, experience is still critical. But it is applied on top of a stable foundation instead of compensating for its absence.

Systems make good decisions repeatable. They allow average days to be handled well and bad days to be handled without heroics.

From individual brilliance to organizational maturity

Operational maturity is reached when decision quality does not depend on who is on shift. When new team members can perform reliably because the system guides them. When senior experts spend less time firefighting and more time improving how decisions are made.

This shift delivers concrete benefits:

• Faster recovery during disruptions.

• Lower operational stress.

• Better coordination across teams.

• Stronger resilience over time.

It also changes culture. Teams stop celebrating heroics and start valuing consistency and clarity.

The uncomfortable truth airlines must face

Many airlines believe they are system-driven because they have tools, dashboards and reports. In reality, they are still experience-driven, with systems acting as supporting actors rather than decision backbones.

As long as airlines rely on “who knows” instead of “how we decide”, they will struggle to scale, learn and remain resilient in increasingly complex environments.

Experience will always matter. But when it is the primary line of defense, the operation is already exposed.