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Welcome Transavia France!
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| Transavia France, the French low-cost airline of Air France – KLM Group, with headquarters near the Orly airport in Paris, has recently decided to implement the Jeppesen Crew Pairing solution and the Boeing Alertness Model.
"The Jeppesen solutions will help us excel in crew planning, both in terms of results and lead times", says Lucas Paichard, Head of Crewing Department at Transavia France. "We expect to become more agile and improve both our ability to better cope with upcoming growth, as well as strengthen our strategic planning in regard to decision support", he concludes.
"We are thrilled to welcome Transavia to our extensive community of operators using our crew optimisers and our bio-mathematical capabilities to address fatigue risk up-front in the planning process", says Mattias Lindquist, Product Manager at Jeppesen. "The Jeppesen pairing optimiser, here provided as a SaaS deployment, features elastic computing and low cost of ownership. We expect the implementation to be very fast and look forward to supporting Transavia for many years to come", he concludes.
The Boeing Alertness Model is addressing risk during pairing and roster generation, applying process control, contrary to the less efficient inspect/re-work approach applied by other models. You are welcome to read more about the difference between those here.
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A Washing-ton of knowledge sharing!
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| What an event! Last month we co-hosted our annual Users Conference with United Airlines which took place in Washington D.C. Once again, we had a record turnout with 196 customers attending from 45 global airline and railway operators. Together they represent around 8,000 aircraft and 360,000 crew.
During the conference, industry experts from all around the world shared their experiences and thoughts on the future of airline operations. A total of 14 presentations and panel discussions, as well as a number of customer advisory boards and customer meetings, took place over the duration of the event. The majority of the presentations were held by airlines themselves about their experiences as well as ambitions. Additionally, the sessions were surrounded by lots of great networking and discussions which took place during the breaks and evening activities.
A big thank you to everyone who attended and made the occasion so engaging and inspiring. Check out the recap video from the event here, and see why attendees find so much value in taking part.
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Running ahead or lagging behind?
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| Reading the recent ECA survey report (link), where some 6900 European pilots provided their view on fatigue risk management, it is clear that we still have a very long way to go in terms of monitoring and managing this aspect properly. With 75% of the pilots experiencing unexpected micro sleeps in the past four weeks, it is safe to say that fatigue reports are just not ‘cutting it’. With the amount of fatigue reports nowhere close to those levels it is far more common for crew NOT to write a report rather than go through the trouble of doing so.
We need to ask ourselves if fatigue reports are at all effective as a lagging indicator telling us what is going on in our operation. Should we just try harder to create simplicity and trust around the existing reporting, or should we also pursue other paths?
Some time back now, Jeppesen published the raise the bar article (link) highlighting the importance of using complementing lagging indicators with actual data reflecting usage of controlled rest as well as simpler, secure and regular assessments provided by the crew.
Jeppesen has tools, processes, and experience well in place to advise and help operators with large-scale data collection at low cost. In case you also have your doubts about the effectiveness of your fatigue reporting and would like to explore other ways of quantifying fatigue risk in your operation - please let us know. Drop us a message here and we'll make sure we help you run ahead, instead of lagging behind. Welcome.
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Improving Psychological Health & Safety
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| General well-being, mental health, work-life balance, and crew fatigue are closely related. Working irregular hours is becoming increasingly common and is always challenging for us humans as we are not well-suited to work during the night. (If we were, our night vision would for example be much more on par with nocturnal animals.) We are meant to sleep during night-time and as soon those night hours are impacted, we are not functioning entirely well.
The strain put on airline crew is bigger than workers in many other industries as the work/rest schedule rarely repeats itself, there are frequent changes to the roster at late notice, and crew may have little or no influence over the roster content. Being able to choose, and be granted, days off where needed or start late or finish early on certain days, plays a major role in solving the life-puzzle with family and friends - but only if the published roster can be trusted.
A very good presentation, highlighting the importance of influence and stability, but also going further, was recently given at the recent IASS gathering in Paris by Paul Cullen, Researcher, Trinity College Dublin. Paul says the industry needs to stop just ‘pulling people up from the river’, but also go upstream to learn why they are ending up in there in the first place. Please consider watching the recorded presentation in his LinkedIn post. It's short and to the point, found via this link. Enjoy.
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Providing Crew Influence at Scale - Part I
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| Lars Söderqvist, you are the product manager for the Jeppesen Crew Rostering product. Can you please give us a quick overview of how you view the difference between preferences and requests for airline crew?
- Sure. A request is a roster property, often in limited supply, that the airline would like to ‘promise’ crew in advance. An example can be a day off at a certain date. If all crew, far in advance, ask for Midsummer off, the airline will grant these requests in some prioritisation order that may be based on the success ration of past requests, seniority, a first-come-first-serve basis, or a combination of those. Once a request is granted, crew should be able to trust that this ‘promise’ will be upheld over time, also surviving day of operation. Preferences on the other hand, are roster properties that the crew express, often with some prioritisation between them, and the airline will grant them if the operational situation permits. These preferences, often also called ‘bids’, are more susceptible to being ‘sacrificed’ when the airline needs flexibility in meeting a varying demand to bring home their revenue. This could be due to disruptions from weather, congestion, technical problems but also other crew falling ill.
Thank you. Why are airlines not only using requests? Would that not make it easier for crew to know their roster in advance and trust that it is being ‘delivered’?
- It would. But look at this way: if only requests were used, a lot of crew influence would be lost by not allowing crew to express their preferences on other aspects. For example, it could be that the airline could only ‘afford’ to promise 100 crew to have Midsummer off, as there will always be uncertainty in both the full demand and the supply of crew on that day. With preferences complementing the requests, the airline would also have knowledge that, let’s say some other 20 crew members, would really appreciate having that day off as well. Whenever possible, the crew management process (automation and manual work) can then prioritise keeping that day open also for these crew, and in the end hopefully 'deliver’ to them too. The drawback is of course that these crew members are not certain it will happen, but overall much more influence is delivered compared to only using requests. Crew may express preferences for a lot of properties the airline can never afford to have requests for.
Give me some examples.
- Short pairings, to come home more often to family. Starting late, to better deal with a commute. Layovers on certain stations. Early finish on Thursdays every second week, to make the tennis game. Compressed work, to leave longer stretches of days off. Being paired up with a certain colleague. Working opposite times from your spouse, to enable more parenting time for the kids. Working the same time as your spouse, to have time off together. Avoiding night duties. And so on… We’ve implemented all of these over the years, and many others.
Thank you Lars. This sounds like it could make a great difference to crew in terms of work-life-balance. Let’s continue this chat in the next FRM News Flash, I would like to hear you explain how this is done practically, at scale, for an airline with a thousand crew to plan for!
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Meet up with our experts:
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Apr 23-24: Jeppesen CDP Conference, Gothenburg, Sweden
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| Missed out on the previous NewsFlash? It's right here.
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