Who decides how aircraft are routed through the network?

J

justinisapilot

Well-Known Member
Just take a look on flight aware and select view inbound. Airlines like SWA seem to have there aircraft start the day on one side of the country and end the day on the opposite coast with multiple stops in-between. Delta on the other hand has aircraft start at the day very early at an outstation, fly to mega hub of choice, and then has the aircraft perform out and backs until ending the day at some other outstation.
So my questions are: What department decides how aircraft are routed through the airlines network? &
Is it not operationally feasible to have dedicated aircraft certain routes? I assume having an aircraft perform the same route (example ATL-MCO-ATL) multiple times a day would cut down on delays that an aircraft might suffer from if it was performing something like CHS-ATL-BNA-ATL-DCA-ATL-ORF and being delayed say in BNA causing delays for the rest of the flights that particular aircraft would have performed that day.
 
At a big airline lots of people are involved in the decision making and the plans are usually made days in advance (initially by computer planning software) and then changed a half dozen times by aircraft routers, maintenance, dispatch, etc. by the time the day rolls around

As to your second question I don't see how your way would work any differently to the way it is done now... If the aircraft is delayed at any point it is going to cause downline delays regardless of whether it is routed to the same place afterwards or to another station. In any case they are typically routed to different cities based on schedule: i.e. if an ATL-MCO-ATL round takes 4 hours to complete maybe the airline wants to operate with more or less frequency than that on that route so another plane can take the same trip starting 2 hours or 6 hours after the first plane's departure. And airline schedules often change several times a month.

One last thing to remember: every single day at least one airplane will be rerouted from what it was scheduled in the morning, some days almost all of them at a hub that is having issues will be rerouted. That is what we in the SOC call a • day.
 
At a lot of smaller airlines, maintenance planning takes precedence. Operations has some flexibility but as soon as you start moving lines of flying around, you'll have higher ups in MX calling and asking why and then indicating that airplane has an "A check" at ORD tonight so an PHL overnight isn't really going to work or the airplane HAS to be back in ZZZ by tomorrow night for an Airworthiness Directive check. Stuff like that......

At bigger airlines it really doesn't seem to matter that much; so a switch here and there is usually not a big deal.
 
g767 said:
At a lot of smaller airlines, maintenance planning takes precedence. Operations has some flexibility but as soon as you start moving lines of flying around, you'll have higher ups in MX calling and asking why and then indicating that airplane has an "A check" at ORD tonight so an PHL overnight isn't really going to work or the airplane HAS to be back in ZZZ by tomorrow night for an Airworthiness Directive check. Stuff like that......

At bigger airlines it really doesn't seem to matter that much; so a switch here and there is usually not a big deal.
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Eh... we usually have 3 to 4 people on shift at all times dedicated to routing and two of them are always MX so it is a big deal at larger airlines as well.
 
belgiumania said:
Eh... we usually have 3 to 4 people on shift at all times dedicated to routing and two of them are always MX so it is a big deal at larger airlines as well.
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Staffing wise I agree..... what I mean is it really isn't a big deal to send N123AB on ZZZ-WWW-ZZZ instead of ZZZ-TTT-ZZZ where as the smaller airline's aircraft rotations was based on the aircraft being at an exact airport weeks/months ago; especially at an airline that doesn't play the hub and spoke game.
 
At many airlines, hub coordinators, ops coordinators, sector supervisors, and sector managers deal with the operational tail routing. They are normally licensed and qualified dispatchers but not always.

Issues in tail routing include aircraft down for maintenance, MEL specific routing, maintenance base routing and also weather delays and diversions. At regionals with multiple types and variants, mainline decides which markets they go to so that brings up an issue when weather is bad and things break. United for example has specific markets it wants the EMB145LR and EMB145XR.

At smaller airlines, the dispatchers do the tail routing and swapping. I know its how Colgan did it and Commutair does it because of the small size of the operation.

The reason airlines dont normally dedicate one aircraft to every route is scheduling flexibility and efficiency.
 
Yeah at Colgan we did alot of the routing though they tried to take alot of that responsibility away from the dispatchers after awhile, probably because it ended up being a huge mess. But being a huge mess was really a defining characteristic of the entire Colgan operation.
 
belgiumania said:
Yeah at Colgan we did alot of the routing though they tried to take alot of that responsibility away from the dispatchers after awhile, probably because it ended up being a huge mess. But being a huge mess was really a defining characteristic of the entire Colgan operation.
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I don't know who you are but you're right!
 
The big boys have a group that oversees the day to day operations of the fleet and communicate change requests
to Maintenance, Crew Scheduling and the Flight Dispatchers as issues arise. Reasons are varied; a jet broke, a jet diverted,
scheduled and un-scheduled mx, a crew member no-show or got sick, weather (departure, enroute, destination), ATC flow control.
Many, many issues.

The smaller regionals normally have the different groups all on the same floor and close at hand. They normally converse with each other
to come up with a course of action.

Here's an example, tail # XXX is assigned to a flight which will put it into KSAN at the end of the day for scheduled mx because it is a mx base. On arrival into another airport from its second leg it has a mx problem which delays it for +1.5 hours. The delay is unacceptable and there happens to be a spare jet in that city so it's swapped for the good jet and continues for 2 more legs to its final destination, KSAN. However, this jet has not required mx. The original jet that broke after leg two came back up and flew two more legs in the other direction and was put into mx at its final destination for the evening at KDTW.
Now this is merely a mx problem. Multiply it a few times then add wx problems and ATC holds and jets can be swapped around many times in the
course of a day.

I hope this helps.
ArmchairFlyer (ACF)
 
When I interviewed with Republic Air, their SOC was one room with about 1-2 dozen work crew scheduling, Dx, and Mx
 
Usually, that's the job for Sector Managers/Hub Coordinators or Duty Managers. But that involves them being proactive...not all airlines have people who are proactive...hell, this industry isn't. The marks of a great duty manager is to able to route the line of flight to minimize schedule interruptions; not only on the day of, but sometimes 72-hours, or even 7 days out.
 
In our group we have operational controll of keeping the system moving sometimes much to the chagrin of Mx, Routing and Crew Scheduling (CS). If I need a jet for some reason and its parked somewhere then I use it as required. It then is up to the Routers to realign it's line of flight to get it into any required mx. The same goes for CS. While our schedule maintains stanby flight crews throughout the system we can set up a recovery flight if needed and tell CS to crew it.

We are very proactive at implementing recovery as required.
 
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