Digital briefing folder makes life easier for pilots
To prepare for a flight, pilots and cabin crews need briefing folders with extensive flight-related documentation, including the operational flight plan, weather data, NOTAMs (Notice to Airmen - important navigational notices) and information on fuel and loading. With the Electronic Flight Folder (EFF) from Lufthansa Systems, these flight documents are now available in digital rather than paper form, and they can be digitally edited as well. Pilots can either download the documents from a briefing station to a laptop or a USB stick or access them via a special Web interface. This simplifies the briefing process and saves a great deal of paper.
With the electronic version of the briefing folder, documents can be edited with virtual sticky notes, digital highlighters and a so-called pen. Crew members can mark and comment on the documents as usual. If a crew member marks a spot on his virtual chart, this mark is immediately visible to his colleagues on that flight. This facilitates coordination both prior to and during a flight, and it significantly reduces the time pilots spend editing and aligning documents.
One particular advantage of the digital documents is that content can be continually updated, and all comments and changes are automatically synchronized on all end devices. This ensures that all crew members are always working with the same version of documents.
By linking flight preparation, execution and follow-up processes, the EFF also makes it possible to evaluate data on the ground and make it available to other applications. This data may be analyzed with regard to fuel requirements, overflight fees or crew duty times, for example. Through its participation in international committees aimed at developing a standard data structure format, Lufthansa Systems is helping to guarantee that data can be exchanged with other compatible systems, such as the onboard information system (OIS) on the Airbus A380.
The Electronic Flight Folder is part of the Lido eFlightBag solution.
Giant jigsaw: Lufthansa Systems solution finds the right aircraft for the right flight
The correct choice of aircraft is crucial for airlines. It directly affects the profitability of a flight and of the entire operation. The better the match of seating capacity to the number of passengers booked, the more profitable the flight will be. This is where fleet assignment comes in. The term describes the process of assigning the right aircraft to each flight. The scheduler utilizes forecast data for the expected number of passengers, based on historical booking figures, holiday periods and special events such as trade fairs. The closer the actual departure time for the flight, the more accurate this forecast data becomes. Lufthansa Systems has now introduced an innovative optimizer tool for fleet assignment that seeks out potential improvements which can save large amounts of money for an international network carrier.
Fleet assignment is an extremely complex matter. It is not only influenced by passenger demand. Departure time, day of the week, airport restrictions, flight distance, aircraft availability and many other parameters need to be taken into consideration. An ideal solution in one category is often impractical in another one. Maintenance requirements and labor regulations require schedules to be confirmed five to six weeks before the actual flight. This is much too early for truly optimized scheduling. While operating costs and regulatory matters can be calculated quite reliably, schedulers do not know just how many passengers will actually be on board a flight until shortly before departure. In the past there was no other option but to work with this long-term and therefore imprecise forecast data.
With its NetLine/Sched Local Fleet Assigner, Lufthansa Systems now offers a new concept that enables an airline to identify and carry out optimizations until shortly before the time of departure, within the framework of legal regulations and with minimum effort. The innovative optimizer concept aims at maximizing the profitability of a schedule while maintaining compliance with deadlines. The Local Fleet Assigner suggests changes which can be made immediately, and it estimates the savings potential of each change. In particular, the solution ensures that the changes made are in agreement with the global schedule and regulations at the end of the process. This ensures maximum profitability of the overall flight schedule.
The Local Fleet Assigner is one of the advanced optimizing tools of the NetLine/Sched schedule management suite which supports the development, management, optimization, and implementation of alternative network strategies.
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