Tasks Involved in Flight Planning
Flight planning tasks for the package carrier are shown in Figure 6. After determining the destination, flight planning begins by assessing aircraft status to make sure there are no MEL or CDL items on it that would create a restriction. CDL items involve physical aspects of the aircraft, such as an airplane may be missing a small slat, the landing lights won’t retract, lens caps may be missing, etc. They look at destination and departure weather, and aircraft type, to make sure they can do the mission with the required payload and fuel. Also, is the airplane certified for the airport conditions (CAT II or III)? Same with the crew. Then they generate a flight plan with projected payloads, and they might adjust that number based on history. Also, they see whether the flight will run on schedule or not because they need the airplane. They’ll also do a fuel analysis to see whether it makes sense to tanker fuel. “I look at all my airplanes at one time for all the MEL/CDL items, then when I’m looking at the weather, you have a geographical region, so you have a feel for the en route weather, now you’re looking for individual destinations and their alternates, then you just put it in the computer and let it cook and see how it looks, and make adjustments as necessary.”
On the night side, the dispatchers come in around 10:45 and do the flight plans to get them over to fueling by midnight. The planes aren’t all there yet, but the fuelers can start their process of figuring how much fuel goes on the trucks. But on some nights there are a lot of tail swaps due to mechanicals or additional volume or airport conditions, so they want to get the work done early to stay ahead of the curve. “We do things sometimes earlier than we need to do because we’re not sure if the computers are going to stay up.”
There may be minor adjustments to the schedule from month to month, primarily for taxi times due to construction at airports, or equipment changes. November and December see major changes due to increased volume; “we put some extra hub facilities in for the peak season.”
A typical dispatcher is responsible for about forty flights in a shift. The dispatcher may talk to Flow Control to “get a feel for an airport, what’s their arrival rate, how are we routing, are we going over the standard inbound fixes.” The dispatcher may call the tower to get runway visual range since this isn’t provided in the new weather release formats and they need it real-time. They may call ATC for special cases, such as an airplane with both transponders inoperative or an unusual MEL item that creates a restriction (such as on speed). The tower may call the dispatcher to find out if they have any special flights planned, such as small jets.
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