I don't like to be that guy, but this doesn't read as a particularly well thought-through experiment... I don't think it's as effective an advertisement for OP's consulting as they may have thought, because it suggests an inability to think within relevant context.
The truth is that given the legal and ethical constraints available, routing is already relatively well-optimized in many places. (There are some places, like China's hybrid civilian-military airspace, where those constraints are extremely nasty and basically make the problem impossible to solve better than it is.)
Aviation tries to solve the fuel consumption problem by designing planes to use less fuel, rather than by flying more optimal routes. There is a massive effort in aviation pretty much all the time to try to use less fuel, for every reason from cost to environmental impact to the relative accessibility of jet fuel now and into the future. It's the reason engines have gotten physically larger; it's a big part of why we don't use supersonic jets anymore as well.
The efforts have been pretty sucessful: https://theicct.org/maximizing-aircraft-fuel-efficiency-desi...
There's no hubris in identifying a problem, and fairly little in thinking you might be able to help solve it, but there's a good bit in imagining nobody else has done it.
I don't understand the negativity here. The author is not advertising themselves as a consultant for the aviation industry specifically - instead this blog reads as a neat demo on how to apply open source data-science tools to a concrete, by very complex problem. I found it both interesting and entertaining to read.
I mean, the post is plastered with screen grabs with parameter lists, and the only actual comparison of fuel consumption in the text is between two different routes?
What is the actual point then? The whole thing feels very out of touch with any underlying reality. The only thing the author reports to doing is downloading, installing and running some code? I agree with the criticism. It is a self congratulatory exercise that has no utility value whatsoever, a point driven home by the solicitation at the end. Like we should be dazzled by the analytic skills of someone who can't understand how his tooling knowledge should be congruent to a real domain to be at all relevant, let alone useful.
TFA is the aerospace equivalent of rolling your own crypto. Outsiders often don’t know what they don’t know, resulting in fatally-naive “solutions” to the problems.