About Airside Labs
Our Mission
Airside Labs helps the travel and aviation industry adopt AI that actually works—systems that understand their domain, earn trust, and hold up under real-world pressure. We pair hands-on engineering with deep sector experience to move organisations from promising prototypes to dependable, production-grade AI. Launched in December 2024 at the Royal Aeronautical Society, we work at the intersection of travel, aviation, and AI.
What We Do
Build & Validate AI Systems
We design, build, and rigorously validate AI systems for travel and aviation—from agentic workflows over legacy aviation data to customer-facing assistants—stress-testing them against domain-specific edge cases, safety constraints, and regulatory expectations before they reach production.
Startup Advisory
We advise founders and leadership teams building across travel, aviation, and AI—bringing decades of product, R&D, and safety-critical experience to strategy, technical due diligence, and go-to-market so the right things get built the right way.
R&D & Open Benchmarks
We research how AI behaves in safety-critical settings and share what we learn—publishing open-source datasets and the Pre-Flight aviation benchmark so the whole community can measure, compare, and improve domain understanding. Our work features in the UK AI Safety Institute's community evaluation collection.
Giving Back to the Industry
Global Standards
We help shape the standards behind aviation's AI future—through the CANSO working group on AI and automation and the IET Aerospace Technical Network—so the sector advances responsibly.
Travel Tech Podcast
On the Travel Tech Podcast we have honest, informal conversations with the startups, leaders, and innovators across travel, AI, and aviation—sharing a genuine passion for the industry and the issues shaping its future.
Our Founder: Alex Brooker
MPhys Astr. CEng FIET CMgr MCMI
Alex has spent his career chasing the same question: how do you make ambitious technology dependable enough to trust with people's lives? He built his first website from a shared house in 1998 while reading for an Astrophysics degree, and the 25+ years since have taken him from the early e-commerce boom to the safety-critical systems that help defend NATO nations at sea and in the air.
At BAE Systems plc, Alex architected the Mission Planning systems used across the entire UK Royal Navy fleet, work recognised with six company innovation awards in 2009 for breakthrough product development across multiple defense divisions.
In 2012 he joined Snowflake Software and helped turn a niche geospatial data company into a certified safety-critical aviation software provider. Under his leadership the business grew from serving mapping agencies to running operational systems for some of the world's most demanding stakeholders—UK NATS, the FAA and IATA—culminating in Snowflake's 2020 acquisition by Cirium (RELX PLC).
Along the way he created the Laminar Data Hub, winner of the IHC Janes Award for Innovation in 2016, and led development of XMAN, the arrival management system that cuts CO₂ emissions at Heathrow and Gatwick and earned the IHC Janes Technology Award in 2015. When the industry needed global data standards, Alex and the Snowflake team delivered the world's first compliant flight plan validation system in the Middle East—later presented to the United Nations as a model for global innovation.
As VP of R&D at Cirium (RELX PLC) he led innovation across 400+ engineers, creating new product categories that are still being built on today.
Alex stays close to how the wider industry adopts AI safely. He sits on the CANSO working group on AI and automation, helping the global air traffic management community shape guidance for trustworthy AI, and chairs the IET Aerospace Technical Network, convening engineers across the sector to advance the responsible use of emerging technology.
At Airside Labs, Alex brings decades of product development to a single goal: making sure AI systems genuinely understand their domains rather than just producing plausible answers.
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