Title:
Contextual Inquiry of a 50 Aircraft Regional Airline Systems Operation Center
Contextual Inquiry of a 50 Aircraft Regional Airline Systems Operation Center
Author(s)
Feigh, Karen M.
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Abstract
A contextual inquiry was conducted at the Systems Operations Control (SOC) of a regional
airline with approximately 50 aircraft from the 8th-11th of November 2006. A total of 35
hours of direct observation were conducted with various members of the SOC Staff including
the System Operations Control Shift Manager (SOCSM), the System Customer Service
Manager (SCSM), the Dispatchers, and the Line Maintenance Planners (LMP). During the
inquiry a wide variety of situations occurred: unscheduled maintenance delays, estimated
ready time slips, a lightning strike, aircraft damage from a ground vehicle, a system-wide
gate printer outage during a departure push, ATC delays, internet and subsequent ACARS
outage, an unruly passenger disruption and turn back, and a sick dispatcher.
The vast majority of these situations were handled as if they were no different from routine
operations; however, there were moments when the SOC personnel were fully involved
in the situation, and other minor tasks were being ignored or transferred to other personnel.
The majority of high impact problems faced by the the airline’s SOC on a daily basis came
from unscheduled maintenance or IT glitches. Unlike other airlines, ATC restrictions are
not often an issue for this airline, although station curfews in southern California do place
an additional constraint on the schedule recovery process. Similarly, weather was also only
a minor issue during the contextual interview.
Beyond the inevitable weather and maintenance interruptions, the majority of problems
stemmed from software tools which limited the efficiency of the SOC personnel, and from
procedures that required the SOCSM to do certain steps multiple times. For example, in
order to keep the non-SOC personnel informed about the state of the airline, the SOCSM
is required to run reports after each routing change and paste them into both email and the
shift log. Additionally, the SOCSM is required to manually enter flight data to create new
flights or to maintain existing ones. Similarly, the SOCSM is also required to manually
enter and maintain maintenance segments for aircraft.
The solution to these problems includes making better use of the current software’s
functionality, investigating the actual information needs of the routing change recipient list,
and incorporating additional automation to automatically create routing change reports and
shift logs. The current software includes a capability to create new flights or maintenance
segments using a correctly formatted text file. Using this capability would save much time
in manual entry and minimize the number of typographical errors. Additional software
should also be created to transition the incident reporting system and the shift log to an
electronic database to facilitate data analysis. The SOCSM is currently responsible for
posting any routing changes to a preset list via email. The actual information needs of
these recipients should be reviewed to determine how frequently this information is actually
required and whether or not a more scheduled reporting of all routing changes during a
given time period might be adequate. Depending on the outcome, it might be possible
to consolidate reports to once or twice a shift. Regardless, additional software should be
created to automate the reporting process.
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Date Issued
2007-02
Extent
Resource Type
Text
Resource Subtype
Technical Report