Abstract
<title>Abstract</title> <p>Flight dispatch has traditionally been supported by locally hosted planning tools, static weather briefing packages, and dispatcher judgement accumulated through years of operational exposure. This arrangement, while functionally adequate for decades, is increasingly strained by the scale, geographic dispersion, and data intensity of contemporary airline and business aviation networks. This paper examines the digital transformation of flight dispatch operations through the adoption of cloud-based decision support systems (CB-DSS), presenting a conceptual architecture that migrates the dispatch function from siloed, on-premise infrastructure toward an elastic, continuously updated, and network-accessible operational control environment. Drawing on literature from cloud computing adoption, aviation data analytics, and operational control system design, the paper develops a four-layer CB DSS architecture encompassing distributed data ingestion, cloud-native analytical processing, collaborative decision orchestration, and multi-device operational delivery. A structured comparative assessment against legacy, on-premise dispatch architecture is presented across ten operational and organisational dimensions, together with projected performance indicators derived from analogous cloud migration case evidence in adjacent transportation and enterprise domains. The analysis indicates that cloud-based dispatch architectures offer substantial gains in system scalability, cross-station data consistency, disaster recovery resilience, and collaborative decision-making speed, while introducing new considerations around data sovereignty, vendor dependency, and cybersecurity exposure that must be proactively managed. The paper concludes with practical implications for airlines, dispatch service providers, and civil aviation authorities, and proposes a research agenda centred on empirical validation, human factors evaluation, and regulatory adaptation for cloud-hosted safety-critical systems.</p>