Title:
Contextual Inquiry of a 100 Aircraft Regional Airline Systems Operation Center
Contextual Inquiry of a 100 Aircraft Regional Airline Systems Operation Center
Author(s)
Feigh, Karen M.
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Abstract
A contextual inquiry was conducted at the Systems Operational Center (SOC) of a Regional
Airline with approximately 100 aircraft from the 24-27th of July 2006. A total of
30 hours of direct observation were conducted with various members of the SOC Staff including
the Director of Systems Operations (DSO), the Manager of Customer Operations
(MCO) and the Line Maintenance Planner (LMP). During the inquiry a wide variety of
situations occurred: unscheduled maintenance delays, estimated ready time slips, a bird
strike, a disruptive passenger requiring a cabin lock-down, a declared emergency due to oil
temperature, taxi delays, weather delays, and brake-cooling delays.
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 pushed
to their professional limits and the introduction of any other, even minor, issue could have
caused severe disruptions to the schedule. The majority of problems faced by the the airline’s
SOC on a daily basis came from lack of resources (planes and flight crew) and from
inclement weather. During the inquiry, between 4-12 planes ( 6-9% of the fleet) were
consistently out for unscheduled maintenance. Additionally, one one day during the observations
241 flight crew who were scheduled to fly were unavailable. 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.
Beyond the resource shortages and the inevitable weather interruptions, the majority of
problems stemmed from software tools which limited the effectiveness of the SOC personnel.
For example, several of the major software tools depend on different databases with
limited connectivity, creating discrepancies between systems and requiring information to
be entered multiple times. Additionally, the VisOps tool, used a primary measure of airline
schedule adherence, does not support the logging of problems/issues, solution generation
through the use of either advanced sort and search features, optimization algorithms and
solution sharing. To make best use of the software tools on hand, especially VisOps, larger
computer monitors are needed. The resolution at which the software tools must be set for
visibility limits their usefulness with 19 inch monitors.
Finally, none of the staff interviewed could indicate to any consistent quantitative feedback
regarding the relative merits of their decisions on overall system performance. Instead,
they often faced inquires about specific decisions which may only make sense when viewed
from the overall context of the situation. Appropriate feedback could be provided as summary
statistics regarding number of fights canceled, average delay and daily operational
costs, which could be generated and displayed to them automatically.
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Date Issued
2006-09
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Resource Type
Text
Resource Subtype
Technical Report