Fly Alliance to Replace Its Entire Flight Management System with flyExclusive's Free, AI-Powered Contrails FMS

flyExclusive (NYSE American: FLYX) announced at NBAA-BACE 2026 that Fly Alliance has agreed to replace its existing flight management system across its entire operation with Contrails FMS, flyExclusive's free, AI-powered aviation operating platform. Fly Alliance's commitment is a full operational transition, not a limited pilot or supplemental deployment.

Fly Alliance has more than 100,000 flight hours and 50,000 dispatched legs. It provides charter, aircraft management, jet cards, fractional ownership, and aircraft sales and acquisitions.

Contrails FMS is designed to let participating operators and brokers access authorized, real-time aircraft availability across participating fleets, making it easier to book flights on one another's aircraft. Its patent-pending scheduling optimizer is intended to reduce empty legs, improve utilization, increase yields, and generate additional revenue.

Operators retain ownership and control of their data. The platform uses tenant isolation and controlled information sharing, and customer identities, customer relationships, proprietary pricing, and commercially sensitive information are not required to be shared.

The platform combines aircraft scheduling, crew compliance, dispatch, maintenance visibility, disruption recovery, fleet optimization, and AI-assisted workflows. It was developed from technology used in flyExclusive's own operations and from intellectual property acquired from Volato Group, including Mission Control. It is offered without software licensing fees, per-seat charges, or feature gates.

The agreement follows flyExclusive's March 2026 announcement that it would make its flight management and scheduling optimization technology available to other Part 135 operators.

Fly Alliance CEO Chris Tasca said the opportunity lies in improving aircraft utilization, eliminating inefficiencies, and creating more revenue opportunities, and that connecting operators could make the charter ecosystem more productive.

flyExclusive is a FAA-certificated private aviation company offering charter, Jet Club membership, and fractional ownership. It operates approximately 80 jets, with in-house MRO facilities at its headquarters in Kinston, North Carolina.

Flight management systems are normally a cost line that each operator carries on its own. Here a company that also competes in charter and fractional ownership supplies the software at no licence fee, and the return comes from the network: the more aircraft that appear in the shared availability pool, the more legs can be matched to open seats and the fewer repositioning flights fly empty. That ties the value of the platform to participation, which is a different commercial logic from selling software to a customer.

The design also shows where the friction sits. Operators are wary of exposing customers and pricing to a rival, so the structure keeps data ownership with each operator and shares only availability. How well that separation holds up in day-to-day use will decide whether other operators treat a rival's platform as neutral infrastructure.

Fly Alliance moving its whole operation, not a pilot slice, gives the model its first full-scale adopter named in this announcement. The next signal is whether further Part 135 operators and brokers sign on, since the shared-availability feature only becomes useful as the number of participating fleets grows.