Historically, airlines had a lot of computing power. In Jim Grays 1984 article about getting to "1000 transactions per second" (TPS), an "ordinary" system ran

Historically, airlines had a lot of computing power. In Jim Grays 1984 article about getting to "1000 transactions per second" (TPS), an "ordinary" system ran at 50 TPS and airlines were pushing above 800 TPS. So, they had capacity and competence. Second, airlines are expensive beasts to run so solving hard problems is worth a lot of money. Third, there are a lot of rules in aviation that suit themselves nicely to combinatorial optimisation. Think crew scheduling: if there is a delay on an inbound flight the crew may not be allowed to fly the aircraft on its next leg since they would exceed their maximum working hours for the day. But then you need to find another crew and a good rescheduling to perhaps a shorter or earlier flight for the original crew. And then you have to think about rescheduling passengers to their connecting flights or holding those flights back a bit to allow the passengers to make the connection. And you have twenty minutes to do it before they land. Handling these "catastrophes" pop up again and again in the daily operations and are well suited for the kind of combinatorial search provided by logic programming in combination with optimisation engines. There are specialist companies in this area. For example, PDC's Turbo Prolog and Visual Prolog products have been used extensively in aviation since the 90s.