Commercial Airline Schedules and Dynamism

In a short definition, Dynamic Scheduling (DS) is the practice of systematic and continuous review of an airline’s flight schedule and its implementation shortly before and right after its publication to achieve and maintain an optimized overall performance level.

Initially, an airline schedule is based on the market conditions and the national/international conjuncture before and at the end of the program preparation and publication. Nevertheless, things sometimes don’t work out as calculated. Airline market conditions are prone to changes and fluctuations due to numerous reasons which might cause?the?schedules?to?be suboptimal.?

Flight cancellations due to weather, potential airplane malfunctios, regional unrest, political unrest, armed conflicts, natural disasters, are all possible disruptive factors those might arise after publication of the official flight schedules. No need to talk about the recent pandemic (Covid-19), I guess everyone has learned their fair share of it.

Airplane malfunctions at the hub of an airline can hardly cause a flight cancellation because changing the airplane with a standby aircraft or swabbing with another one, or combining with another route typically will be possible. In those cases though, the speed of decision making will minimize the customer inconvenience.

An airplane malfunction while at a remote destination airport or a serious malfunction during flight which could cause the airplane to divert and land at an emergency alternate airport, might cause the cancellation of the rest of the flight for the relevant day.

However, in this case, although combining two flight routes to nearby points with a larger aircraft can sometimes help alleviate the problem encountered, the time period during which passengers will experience inconvenience will have importance.

In a sense, monitoring the planned airline schedules and their implementation, and the use of DS interventions are carried out continuously (7/24) by most of the major Airline Operation Control Centers which can involve personnel from Crew Planning, Maintenance Control Center, Dispatch Office and a representative of airline management brass.

Due to ongoing armed conflicts across the world, economic problems, etc. the level of uncertainty is still significant in the airline industry. Therefore, in my opinion, in order to minimize customer churn and loss of profit, the world's leading airlines need to regularly play and brainstorm different scenarios using artificial intelligence technology and real-time communication tools.

The paradigm of scheduling and network planning has not changed since the last three decades. However, thanks to today’s cutting edge technology, adapting a prepared schedule to disruptions due to numerous reasons can be done more easily and seamlessly than yesterday (metaphorically).

Benefiting from adapting schedules using state-of-the-art programs might allow airline commercial, maintenance and crew planners to model a wide variety of scenarios.

A wide range of potential issues can create complexity, constraints and limit flexibility on the path to the airline's intermediate goals and main objective.

Macro and micro level optimization can minimize all potential disruptions.

Although, DS have been done by World’s major flag carriers for so many years, the factors which can be deemed as the game changers today to enable the DS to be more effective are today’s cutting edge technology, IT, computer science, Big Data capabilities, and Artificial Intelligence. Therefore we can underscore the value of today’s effective DS which presents an invaluable model in today’s environment.

By Captain SAVA? üSKENT ?

SUD AVIATION STRATEGY

? JANUARY 2025