When crew constraints, connection clusters, and slot windows collide simultaneously, operations teams don't have a tooling problem. They have a decision-making muscle memory problem. Shepherd fixes that.
Aviation has invested heavily in tooling. Real-time data, integrated dashboards, automated alerts. But no tool prevents a controller from prioritising the wrong flights when crew constraints and connection clusters collide at 02:00.
The problem is trained intuition. Military aviation solved this with simulation decades ago. Commercial operations haven't.
Shepherd is a war games simulation environment for airline operations teams. Live facilitator control. Branching decision scenarios. Automated after-action review with benchmarked scoring across every dimension of operational judgment.
Branching disruption scenarios across crew, connection, runway, weather, and systems events. Replays actual industry event patterns. New scenarios authored in minutes by your ops team.
Real-time session runner for facilitators. Inject events, pause for debrief, monitor every team's decision path simultaneously. War room and individual participant views.
Automated post-session scoring across 5 dimensions: cascade awareness, priority accuracy, regulatory compliance, resource efficiency, and passenger impact. Benchmarked against industry norms.
Individual and cohort performance tracked across sessions. Identify decision pattern gaps by role, shift, and experience level. Progress visible over time.
C-suite and director-level strategic exercises. Network-wide scenario planning. Stress-test recovery strategies before the next major disruption event. Facilitated engagements available.
Participant management, role assignment, and cross-carrier session support. Designed for ops, customer experience, ground handling, and frontline teams — not just OCC controllers.
Every scenario is timed, cascading, and scored. Participants feel the weight of real constraints. Facilitators control the tempo.
Delay cascade has pushed 4 crews into their final 2 hours of duty simultaneously. Standby pool has 2 crews available. Must select 2 of 4 FTL-affected flights to operate. Flights: BA721 (82 connections, 4h20), BA722 (12 connections, 1h45), BA723 (45 connections, crew at destination), BA724 (last service to thin route, 180 pax).
Every session ends with an automated after-action review. Scoring is system-derived — not self-reported. Scenario options are pre-tagged with cascade and priority metadata, producing deterministic, consistent assessment across every participant.
Team's cascade awareness score (6.2/10) was 18% below benchmark. Pattern: consistently under-protected connection clusters when primary disruption was crew-origin. Recommend: crew-cascade specific scenario block in next session.
Shepherd was founded by a former British Airways Customer Experience Expert who owned the Heathrow disruption management product. This is not an academic product.
A predecessor disruption intelligence project was selected for the IATA accelerate@iata programme — a competitive cohort of the highest-potential aviation startups globally. Founder-level IATA credibility carried forward into Shepherd.
The aviation operations intelligence category is being validated in real time. Navi AI's recent $6.7M raise confirmed investor confidence in AI-powered ops tools. Shepherd owns the decision-making layer Navi doesn't.
Shepherd isn't just for OCC controllers. The decision gap exists across every team that interfaces with disruption — and every team that needs to coordinate when it cascades.
Network controllers, shift supervisors, and duty managers. The teams making live decisions under pressure when cascades compound.
Ground handlers, airport operations teams, and turnaround coordinators managing the physical execution of the recovery plan.
Contact centre, airport customer service, and frontline passenger-facing teams who carry the passenger impact burden during disruption events.
Network directors, COOs, and CXOs who need to stress-test recovery strategies and crisis governance frameworks at the strategic level.
We work with a focused set of airline partners. Request a briefing to discuss your operations context and how Shepherd maps to it.
No sales process. Direct conversation with the founding team.