Airline technology has changed far less than most other enterprise software over the past two decades. Rather than replacing the core systems underneath, the industry has largely extended them, adding new capabilities around architectures designed for a very different era.
That is beginning to change. Cloud-native architectures, APIs, NDC and the industry’s gradual move towards Offer and Order are creating the conditions for a new generation of airline software. The shift affects every carrier, but its implications vary depending on size. For mid-tier airlines, typically those carrying fewer than 10 million passengers a year, it is a change worth paying close attention to.
Why did staying on a legacy PSS make sense?
Nobody kept a legacy passenger service system out of pure inertia. For most of the past twenty years, staying put was the rational decision for a smaller carrier. The alternatives on the market were often built on much the same architecture, with the same ticket-based operating model and the same dependence on the vendor’s roadmap.
Switching carried real operational risk: months of migration, extensive retraining, and potential revenue disruption during the transition. At the end of it, an airline often arrived at a platform with many of the same fundamental limitations as the one it had left. Weighed against that, doing nothing was a perfectly defensible choice.
What changed?
It is no longer true that nothing better exists. Modern development tools, cloud infrastructure, AI and open industry standards have dramatically reduced the effort required to build and maintain complex enterprise software. Credible alternatives are now operating in production, built on cloud-native, API-first architectures rather than incremental evolutions of legacy transactional platforms.
The economics have shifted too. The cost of staying put keeps rising. For years, the routes never launched and the projects repeatedly delayed because of system limitations were hidden costs, easy to leave off the balance sheet. Economic pressure, rising passenger expectations and more demanding commercial partners have made those costs much harder to ignore.
When competitors can launch products faster, optimise pricing continuously and respond more quickly to market changes, technology increasingly becomes a commercial differentiator rather than simply an operational necessity.
What does modernising look like now?
The biggest change is not just the technology itself, but how airlines can adopt it. A modular approach allows a carrier to replace one part of its stack at a time, rather than committing to a multi-year rip-and-replace programme. A common data layer allows those modules to work together without creating another collection of disconnected systems.
That matters most for mid-tier carriers, which rarely have the resources or the appetite for a full-scale migration. Modernising one capability at a time, at their own pace, turns a daunting transformation into a series of manageable steps. An airline can start where the operational or commercial pain is greatest, demonstrate value quickly, and expand from there.
The window is open
For many years, waiting was often the rational decision. The technology was not ready, and the risk of switching outweighed the reward.
That calculation has changed.
The tools now exist, they are proven in production, and the cost of standing still continues to compound. The question is no longer whether credible alternatives exist. It is when the economics of staying where you are no longer make sense.
Hadrien Musitelli is co-founder and CEO of CitizenPlane, the cloud operating system for mid-tier airlines. Learn more at citizenplane.com.
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