Air Cargo

Company Background

The client is one of the world’s largest air cargo carriers, operating more than 59,000 flights annually to over 300 destinations across 90 countries. The company provides outsourced aircraft and aviation services to major logistics firms and government customers. With roughly 5,000 employees and several billion dollars in annual revenue, it runs a large and complex internal technology environment to keep operations moving around the clock.

‍

Challenge

The client’s central flight operations application manages flight data, aircraft schedules, cargo details, and temperature monitoring for refrigerated cargo. Over time it had accumulated serious technical debt. The front-end React code was running on React 14 (released in 2015) and carrying 505 security vulnerabilities: 78 critical, 261 high, 147 moderate, and 19 low. The build pipeline ran on a combination of Webpack, Babel, and Gulp. There were no unit tests, and security issues were invisible during CI/CD runs. A .NET 8 upgrade had been stalled for a long time. A separate crew notification application had not functioned in years.

‍

The internal team was small: one developer, one interim project manager, and one shared QA resource with limited React experience. Stride came in to accelerate the work and deliver real improvement within those constraints.

‍

Solution

Stride took an incremental approach rather than attempting a full rewrite. The team audited the entire React codebase by hand, then built a step-by-step upgrade path from React 14 to React 17. They replaced the old Webpack/Babel/Gulp build chain with Vite, set up a unit testing framework from scratch, and added automated security auditing to the Azure CI/CD pipeline so issues would show up on every build.

‍

For the stalled .NET 8 upgrade, Stride tracked down configuration-related proxy forwarding issues that had been blocking deployment and got the UI project working with the new runtime. For the crew notification application, the team rebuilt it from the ground up on current versions of Firebase and Angular, restoring a communication channel that had been dark for years.

‍

Stride also worked with leadership on how the engineering team was organized: mapping dependencies between teams, reviewing team charters, and introducing practices that gave individual teams more autonomy and reduced coordination bottlenecks. The goal was to help the client move from a project-driven IT model toward a product-led engineering one.

‍

Outcomes

• 99.8% Fewer Security Vulnerabilities: 505 vulnerabilities reduced to 1. All 78 critical and 261 high-severity issues are resolved. The single remaining item is a moderate warning tied to a Bootstrap styling dependency currently under evaluation.
• Crew Notification System Back Online: The application had been non-functional for years. Stride rebuilt it from the ground up and unblocked a downstream data integration that had been depending on it.
• Modernized Tech Stack: React upgraded from 14 to 17. Legacy Webpack/Babel/Gulp build tooling replaced with Vite. The .NET 8 upgrade advanced to staging and was scheduled for production release.
• Better Foundation for the Team: Unit tests running in the CI/CD pipeline. Security auditing automated on every build. Team practices and documentation improved so the client’s engineers could maintain and extend the work confidently going forward.

‍