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Operations Control at Air France

Operations control at Air France involves extensive planning by 80 flight planners working 24/7. Their goals are safety, economy, and passenger comfort. They plan flight routes, anticipate issues, and minimize fuel usage using computer programs and human judgment. Planning includes determining flight frequencies, fleet assignments, bank times, block times, maintenance schedules, crew planning, gate usage, and recovery strategies for delays. Flight plans constructed a few hours in advance are finalized and signed off by both planners and captains prior to departure.

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Nishantha Fernando
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261 views2 pages

Operations Control at Air France

Operations control at Air France involves extensive planning by 80 flight planners working 24/7. Their goals are safety, economy, and passenger comfort. They plan flight routes, anticipate issues, and minimize fuel usage using computer programs and human judgment. Planning includes determining flight frequencies, fleet assignments, bank times, block times, maintenance schedules, crew planning, gate usage, and recovery strategies for delays. Flight plans constructed a few hours in advance are finalized and signed off by both planners and captains prior to departure.

Uploaded by

Nishantha Fernando
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Operations control at Air France

‘In many ways a major airline can be viewed as one large planning problem which is usually approached
as many independent, smaller (but still difficult) planning problems. The list of things which need
planning seems endless: crews, reservation agents, luggage, flights, through trips, maintenance, gates,
inventory, equipment purchases. Each planning problem has its own considerations, its own
complexities, its own set of time horizons, its own objectives, but all are interrelated.’ (Rikard Monet, Air
France).

Air France has 80 flight planners working 24-hour shifts in their flight planning office at Roissy, Charles
de Gaulle. Their job is to establish the optimum flight routes, anticipate any problems such as weather
changes and minimise fuel consumption. Overall, the goals of the flight planning activity are first, and
most important, safety followed by economy and passenger comfort. Increasingly powerful computer
programs process the mountain of data necessary to plan the flights, but in the end many decisions still
rely on human judgement. Even the most sophisticated expert systems only serve as support for the
flight planners. Planning Air France’s schedule is a massive job that includes the following.

● Frequency – for each airport how many separate services should the airline provide?

● Fleet assignment – which type of plane should be used on each leg of a flight?
● Banks – at any airline hub where passengers arrive and may transfer to other flights to continue their
journey, airlines like to organise flights into ‘banks’ of several plans which arrive close together, pause to
let passengers change planes and all depart close together.

● Block times – a block time is the elapsed time between a plane leaving the departure gate at an
airport and arriving at its gate in the arrival airport. The longer the allowed block time, the more likely a
plane will keep to schedule even if it suffers minor delays, but the fewer flights can be scheduled.

● Planned maintenance – any schedule must allow time for planes to have time at a maintenance base.

● Crew planning – pilot and cabin crew must be scheduled to allocate pilots to fly planes on which they
are licensed and to keep within the maximum ‘on duty’ allowances. ● Gate plotting – if many planes are
on the ground at the same time there may be problems in loading and unloading them simultaneously.

● Recovery – many things can cause deviations from any plan in the airline industry. Allowances must be
built in that allow for recovery.

For flights within and between Air France’s 12 geographic zones, the planners construct a flight plan that
will form the basis of the actual flight only a few hours later. All planning documents need to be ready
for the flight crew who arrive two hours before the scheduled departure time. Being responsible for
passenger safety and comfort, the captain always has the final say and, when satisfied, co-signs the
flight plan together with the planning officer.

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