| Air India, the flag carrier airline of India and headquartered in New Delhi, was recently welcomed back to the Tata Group and is now poised to soar high with many new aircrafts on order. We are happy to share that they have now decided to use the Jeppesen suite of crew planning solutions. The recent agreement includes Jeppesen Crew Pairing, Rostering, Crew Bid and the Boeing Alertness Model (BAM).
"As we embark on our journey to be the most technologically advanced airline, we have nothing but the highest ambitions for our crew management processes. We expect the Jeppesen crew planning solution suite to fully support our growth plans and operations with leading flexibility and optimization technology, striking the best balance between efficiency, robustness, operational costs, and crew satisfaction", says Dr. Amit Kumar Das, Head – Operations Technology, at Air India. "Jeppesen Crew Bid will ensure we provide crew with good influence over their work content, while BAM will keep fatigue risk to a minimum. The implementation is already happening, and we look forward to going live in next couple of months. We also envisage it to be seamlessly linked to our Crew tracking solution", he concludes.
"We are extremely proud and humbled to be selected by Air India and are very appreciative of our collaboration that is already on-going for the installation", says Kedarinath Shastry, Portfolio Sales Director at Boeing. "With decades of R&D poured into these products, constantly enhancing and refining optimization and flexibility, we are certain we will be able to support Air India well, regardless of challenges that may follow from the tremendous growth planned for the upcoming period."
Welcome to read more about the Jeppesen Crew Solution suite via this link. More information about the Jeppesen FRM solutions, including the Boeing Alertness Model, is found here. As for RAVE, being the key behind the unprecedented configurability of the Jeppesen Crew Solutions, please consider reading more in this document.
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CDP - a truly massive display of passion and knowledge
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| The Jeppesen CDP conference, held annually since 1998, took place in Gothenburg on April 25-26th and attracted a record-breaking crowd. For the first time ever, and much to our dismay, we needed to decline customers attendance. We quite simply ran out of space! But... what an event it was! With 227 registered customers plus Jeppesen staff we most likely had a majority of the most prominent experts in the field of crew and ops management gathered at once in the same place. The event certainly delivered on, and exceeded, most participants already-elevated expectations.
A 'buffet' of 25 different workshops, held in 11 parallel conference rooms in 6 sessions over the two days, made it possible for the participants to tailor their conference experience in some 500,000 different ways. However, with the audiences solid background in optimization, no one had the slightest problem finding the shortest path through the program that maximised their attendance value. ;-) This was a two-day display of huge passion and knowledge in managing some of the most challenging planning problems currently (or very soon) possible to solve.
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| At the very end of the conference, it was announced that the annual User's Conference will be held on November 6-8th in Washington D.C., co-hosted by United Airlines. We look forward to welcoming all of our customers there this fall! Let's hope and prepare for, another event passing beyond 300 participants! Or why not 400?
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| Harold French Dodge, born 1893 in Lowell, Massachusetts, was one of the principal architects of the science of statistical quality control; concepts and methods used successfully for more than 50 years within virtually all kinds of manufacturing.
Somewhat surprisingly, many airline and rail operators still to this day are using inspection in trying to achieve quality in their crew management processes. They do so by enforcing a limit on an output from a bio-mathematical fatigue model, applying it to the very end of their manufacturing process of crew pairings and rosters. After they have been constructed.
Inspection can indeed be useful for gathering data on the process. Using that data to learn if a process has gone out of control and a special cause of variation needs to be investigated is useful. Using that data to evaluate the success, or failure, of an attempt to improve the process is also useful. However, inspecting in order to pull out and rework the failed items from the production before being passed on, is a path to failure. If the process is this bad, the process needs to be improved. Or as Harold put it:
“You can not inspect quality into a product"
The quality, good or bad, is already in the product. You are welcome to read in this one-pager about two very different approaches of managing fatigue risk in the crew management process. Welcome also to contact us here for a discussion on how we may help you to make a real difference to your fatigue risk exposure.
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How long can you go without sleep?
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Sleep is a vital part of our daily routine. It is as important to our health as breathing, eating healthily, and exercising. However, the fast-paced world we live in today often makes us forget the importance of a good night’s sleep. Many people believe that they can function well even without enough sleep, but the truth is that sleep deprivation can have serious consequences on our physical and mental health from the first hour of missed sleep. Read the full article here.
Sleep Cycle, with millions of users worldwide, has built up what is likely to be the world’s richest repository with data reflecting global sleep habits. They have many interesting articles about sleep that are worth checking out on their website.
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Introducing Jeppesen PAPI
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Are you certain that you utilize your crew in the best possible way? Augmented operations, using a third and sometimes also a fourth pilot on the flights, is determined in part by regulation but also airline-internal agreements. Typical constructs for deciding the augmentation level are anticipated acclimatisation, departure time and the duration of a flight. Just like with other rules, it is difficult to mimic human physiology using just binary thresholds why such constructs always becomes over-simplifications. The end result is that extra pilots are assigned where they make a very minor difference in reducing fatigue risk, while they are not assigned for other flights where they would have made a much more important contribution.
Up until recently, it was impossible to let a prediction from a bio-mathematical fatigue model, in real-time during pairing optimization, dynamically 'decide' on the augmentation level in full balance with other objectives. You can think of it as a Catch-22 type of decision for the optimiser: 'If the pilots are predicted to be fatigued, another pilot should be assigned - but then they will be able to sleep more during the flight, becoming more alert - and then that extra pilot is no longer needed. But then...'
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A recent Jeppesen breakthrough in modelling and optimisation technology now enables a smooth assignment of more pilots to flights as a function of the predicted fatigue levels. Just like a pilot hitting the right approach angle at the final, airlines can now use the pairing optimiser to hit just the right amount of crew on each flight, guided by a bio-mathematical model. The functionality has been babtized Jeppesen PAPI, for Pilot Augmentation Precision Improvement, and is right now delivered as a service offering by the Scheduling Safety team for airlines interested in developing alternative staffing scenarios with potential of improving flight safety in the most efficient way. Welcome to contact us here for a more detailed discussion.
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Meet up with our experts:
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| MAY 22-24: AGIFORS, Santiago, Chile
NOV 6-8: Jeppesen Users Conference, Washington D.C., USA
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| Missed out on the previous NewsFlash? It's right here.
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