Flight Planning and Schedule Maintenance
A central piece of information virtually every operational process at an
airport is depending on is of course the flight schedule.
Arrival and Departure times of aircraft of a certain Airline and certain
aircraft type to or from a specific destination / origin drive basically
everything and everybody at an airport. Even seemingly unrelated entities such
as concessions do have a correlation with the flight schedule since traffic
peaks or delays have effects on every aspect of airport life!
Within the framework of our Universal Flight Information System UFIS1,
we use the module
FIPS to perform flight planning and schedule Maintenance.
Any flight plan at an airport is created in a seasonal framework, where
airlines, ATC and relevant authorities submit their (more or less coordinated)
flight plans to the airport, which is then combined to the airport’s seasonal
schedule as a medium to long term orientation for everybody concerned.
In most cases a schedule template (usually last years equivalent season) is
copied and than modified with all changes and additions as most flights will
remain the same over the years so that this method is easier than constructing
the new flight schedule from scratch every time.
The seasonal schedule is then extracted to generate daily schedules (usually the
day before the actual day of operations and changes are edited for the specific
date and additional data is entered to the raw material. This extraction from a
seasonal schedule and manual correction is a time consuming and tideous work,
which is why we have eliminated this process within our system.
Thanks to powerful databases and processing capabilities FIPS stores all flight
information in the right format and with all necessary data for each day of a
season in one large schedule without any artificial barrier between seasonal and
daily flight information. Depending on the requirements, different views on this
database are offered to the user including very easy and flexible seasonal
editing views for flights in a seasonal context or detailed views per flight per
day.
In our solutions, we are installing and customizing operator workplaces
including hardware with up to three monitors per station so that operators have
a full set of information at hand at all times.
User training enables the operators to create and maintain the flight schedules
receive and communicate all changes in real time during live operations. There
is no back-office / front-office barrier in handling flight data at any time!
Information update and downward communication is highly automated with
interfaces to / from Airlines, the SITA and AFTN networks, ATC and many other
relevant institutions available, which ensures data consistency and immediate
updates when changes occur. Thus, the entire (connected) airport community
automatically and immediately is informed about the current schedule and any
updates in real time, reducing costs and waste of resources and keeping service
standards at a high level – whatever event occurs.
