Crew Control

Once the roster creation process has commenced, any new schedule requirements or late changes are usually passed onto Crew Control in the Operations Control Center. Last-minute changes of any type create the risk of insufficient crew available to accommodate all changes or worst case, flight cancellations.

Historically, when a flight was short of crew, the priority was to find an immediate replacement irrespective of its cost. Controllers would use their expertise and experience to find a qualified substitute, a manual process that also relied on “gut feel.” While individuals that responded favorably to previous last-minute roster changes were given a positive weightage, few controllers would ever consider overall crew replacement costs. While this may have been a marginally acceptable practice in a less competitive environment, cost consideration must be an integral part of decision-making moving forward.

When searching for a substitute crew, airline controllers need to be aware of the costs associated with overtime, logistics, and many other factors. These need to be considered, and their costs weighed out, before deciding on a replacement. As a baseline, every roster must comply with legal guidelines, but for efficient operations almost equal importance must be given to costs. Automated tools can provide controllers with cost-based crew replacement suggestions and overall cost implications of planning adjustments. With airlines struggling to generate positive margins, any incremental costs, such as overtime, may need to be restricted or undergo a second approval.

As airlines become more cost-centric, every decision needs to weigh both safety and impact to the bottom line. Cost-driven decision-making related to crew management system is critical to ensuring operational efficiency and controlling airline spending. Meticulously planned and optimized rosters can fall apart in the build-up to departure, with unexpected changes leading to additional costs. Airlines need to be aware of the reasons behind these changes. Analyzing past flown rosters and their changes between publication and operations is critical to:

• Understand cost of disruptions
• Establish best practices to manage roster changes on the day of departure
• Incorporate better assumptions into all Crew Management planning processes

Currently, crew swaps are legal if they fulfill specific parameters, yet airlines hardly consider their cost implications. Crews commonly wait for their rosters to be published and then immediately start swapping them. These swaps can affect an entire trip or individual flights within an itinerary, leading to drastic roster changes. Effectively, this means that a crew pairing judged too costly at the planning stage can still end up operating a flight on the day of departure through roster swapping. This needs to be analyzed more rigorously moving forward. Automated tools can instantly reveal the cost impact of crew swaps on planned rosters.

Interestingly, while airlines invest significantly in tools that generate optimized rosters, little to no analysis is performed on why rosters change and how they impact the airline and its crew. This underscores the importance of having the right tools to analyze changes to published rosters, the reasons behind them, and identify associated costs.