Aviation and travel are notoriously vulnerable to social, economic, and political events, as well as the ever-changing expectations of consumers. The coronavirus was just a piece of the challenge. This post explores how Lufthansa leverages data streaming powered by Apache Kafka as cloud-native middleware for mission-critical data integration projects and as data fabric for AI/machine learning scenarios such as real-time predictions in fleet management. An interactive conversation with Lufthansa as an on-demand video is added at the end as a highlight if you want to learn more.