Daniel Stecher

WORK HISTORY

EDUCATION

SKILLS

ABOUT DANIEL STECHER

In 2014 I put eye-tracking equipment on airline controllers during their shifts.300 to 500 eye fixations per hour searching for information across 14 different systems. By hour eight, controllers spent more cognitive energy on screen navigation than on the decisions that protect revenue, passengers, and safety.That experience changed how I think about airline operations technology.Most platforms store and process data. Very few are built around how people think under pressure. That gap shows up most clearly during irregular operations, when the situation exceeds the process and a controller has to make a judgment call with incomplete information in real time.I have spent 30 years studying that gap. Across urban logistics, IT, cargo, and airline operations in 80+ countries.What I have learned is this: AI is not replacing jobs. It is replacing a cognitive style. Most organizations don\'t know which type dominates their operations team. That is the real risk they haven\'t priced in yet.What I do:I bring iFlight Core to smart airlines with the right mindset. A unified, cloud-native platform for flight operations and crew management that shifts controllers from reactive data hunting to proactive situational awareness.The cognitive load reduction is a consequence of giving people one coherent picture of their operation instead of fourteen fragmented ones.Customers who described it as \"the same level of technology and decision support as a large airline, without the complexity,\" and unifying operations across various group AOC\'s.Who I talk to:CEOs of growing airlines who know their next disruption will expose an architectural problem, not a human one.Operations directors whose controllers compensate for system failures with workarounds that exist only in people\'s heads.One thing few profiles mention:Before aviation I hired and managed cycle messengers in Berlin from 1994 to 2001. Thousands of interviews under pressure. That experience taught me to read people and situations before systems existed to help me do it. It still shapes how I assess operational environments today.I also founded Airline Crewing & Operations Enigma, a community of 1,110 members across 260 airlines, and write on operational patterns the industry sees but rarely names.If you lead operations at a growing airline and want to understand what unified operations actually looks like in practice, I am worth a conversation.