Montréal startup StratosX has landed a partnership with Air Transat to help the airline minimize flight disruptions amid a chaotic time for air travel.
The aerospace software startup announced on Thursday that its “recovery platform” for airlines, X360, is being deployed by Canadian leisure airline Air Transat to manage its aircraft, crew, and passengers. StratosX says its platform uses predictive modelling and generative AI, paired with an airline’s internal operations data, to recommend how planes and passengers should be rerouted to minimize costs and wasted time.
“We are collaboratively building the plane as we fly it.”
Joshua Goring, StratosX
“Typically, what happens is people will choose the first workable solution, which is: how do I fix the disruption?” Joshua Goring, chief commercial officer at StratosX, told BetaKit in an interview. “They don’t choose the best one, because they’re firefighting.”
“What our system will do is seek out where disruption is happening and proactively suggest the quickest way to recover from that,” whether that’s rebooking passengers or moving a reserve crew around, Goring said.
Unpredictable weather events, geopolitical conflicts, and labour disputes have plagued air travel in recent years. In the summer of 2025, more than 8.7 million Canadian passengers faced flight disruptions, according to travel tech company AirHelp, driven largely by a nationwide strike by Air Canada workers.
From a business perspective, Goring said disruptions and their cascading impacts create a $60-billion USD problem for airlines, which are also seeing their bottom lines squeezed by skyrocketing fuel prices.
Air Transat has been no exception. In its second-quarter earnings, the airline reported a net loss of $79 million, about $50 million more than the same period last year. It attributed the loss to an “unprecedented industry-wide fuel crisis.” The airline operates more than 40 aircraft, with flights to over 70 destinations, many of which are marketed as vacation spots.
In an email to BetaKit, Air Transat spokesperson Stéphanie Dussault said the platform is being “codeveloped” with StratosX and allows the company to look at information about aircraft, crew, and passenger experience all at once.
“As a Canadian airline, we are also pleased to collaborate with a Canadian company bringing homegrown innovation to the aviation sector,” Dussault wrote.
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StratosX says its system is set up to detect when pressure is building on a certain part of an airline’s operations—for example, to flag staffing shortages or worsening weather conditions (which Goring said are becoming a more frequent and severe problem).
Founded last year by CEO Ghislain Gagné and COO Kaitlin Guarino, a former director of operations at Southwest Airlines, StratosX now has a team of roughly 10 people. Goring said that Air Transat’s feedback will help the team tweak and refine the platform.
“We are collaboratively building the plane as we fly it,” he said.
Feature image courtesy StratosX.