The top - 5 business scenarios
The same system works. We just need to change input and output data
- Provable man-power, or crew demand calculation
- Preferential Bidding for the period ahead
- Generating the Flight Schedule Adjustments
- Dynamic rescheduling
- Empowering the charter sales team with the actual crew and tail availability
Crew Demand Calculation
The primary purpose of this scenario is to calculate the minimal number of the crew sets the operator will need to cover the flight schedule or the crew demand represented in person-days.
Policy for vacation, sick leave, standby, and training also could be assigned as a fixed number per day, a percentage per team, or the average number of days per year.
The result is not just a number of crew sets. This number could be verified with crew pairings and rosters that comply with all regulations. Recommended crew accommodation and positioning are also part of the system's final data set.
Preferential Bidding
This scenario is valuable for operators who, according to law, or union agreements, must assign crew OFF days in advance but still has some flexibility in selecting the exact days.
The input data for this scenario is the predefined crew members with their credentials, pre-assigned vacation and training days, crew OFF days requests, and crew schedule days before the planning period.
Different individual rules could be applied to follow the operator's business practices, like long-lasting positioning for pilots living far from the base or patterns for ON-OFF days.
Flight Schedule adjustments
It could be valuable for unscheduled operations and the strategic planning of regular flights
The main idea of this scenario is that a slight adjustment of the flight departure time allows the airline to reduce the cost of crew positioning and accommodation, increases crew utilization, and minimizes the risk of delays due to the unavailability of crews.
In this scenario, we allow the system to change the flight segment's departure time in some range to find a more efficient solution. For example, to reduce crew sets number or crew-related costs.
One test based on the peak month schedule of operators with 30+ tails demonstrated a 10 percent decrease in the total crew demand. It could be valuable, indeed.
Dynamic rescheduling
Probably, the most popular scenario. Some could name it 'Crew Tracking' or 'Crew recovery'
We provide the system with detailed and precise flights, stand-by, and crew schedules with explicit crew credentials as incoming data. Forecast regarding the chance of flight cancellation or the change of aircraft type increases the schedule robustness.
For example, if an assignment somehow violates FTL due to delays or new flight segments were added, or there is no other way to assign crew. The system could also recommend new crew positioning based on the tickets in the GDS available.
Charters sales support
Was initially developed to empower the unscheduled operations of airlines but became interesting for the business jet operators.
For each crew member, the system generates time intervals when they could be assigned to a new flight duty period or if their assigned FDP could start earlier or could end later without affecting other assignments and OFF days and follows the FTL rules.
After that, we intersect these time intervals with the tails schedule. The result is a list of possible time gaps when the tails could be booked without any crew-related issues provided to sales and could be uploaded to the online quotation tools.
If there is no crew to fly the customer request, we could run the Dynamic rescheduling scenario to find out if it is possible to re-arrange the crew assignments without OPS team involvement.