Dispatch From Home
- Thread starter manniax
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Empennagie
Well-Known Member
Not at either but this happened a while back. Have some friends at skw, they said it's a work in progress to get it going again.
From my experience at skw abs my current carrier where some ops groups are remote, I don't get the fear mongering. The arguments I've heard are very weak and what if, what if, what if.
From my experience at skw abs my current carrier where some ops groups are remote, I don't get the fear mongering. The arguments I've heard are very weak and what if, what if, what if.
flynryan692
Well-Known Member
I'm not at SKW anymore so I don't know the current status. I was told by SKW that they intended to have dispatchers working the SkyWest Charter flights (135) be remote and not mix those desks with 121, so I assume that will still happen. The decision doesn't surprise me, COVID is an after thought for most people at this point so other than being advantageous for management the only other use is emergency situations (which COVID was in the beginning).
MT
Well-Known Member
There’s not much weak about your job being done by you from home tomorrow but next year being done by someone overseas for a significant fraction of your salary.
Shock-Diamonds
Well-Known Member
I’m of the opinion that we should voice strong concerns for things like working from home or anything that could impact safety; but hey, I’m just trying to prolong my career until we’re all replaced by DispatchGPT…
DessertDx
Well-Known Member
I asked ChatGPT a few dx questions which it got a lot of them wrong. Job security is still there.
Just for clarity on the state of AI:
GPT-3 (which ChatGPT was initially based on) was trained on 570GB of data. Which is not actually all that much. Some napkin math indicates that the amount of data for a truly knowledgeable and importantly, unbiased AI model of dispatch would be orders of magnitude higher, and there is a lot of work involved in generating AI training data. 570GB was a LOT for them to acquire and sift through. Terabytes would take years. Training GPT-3 cost $4.6 million. Training GPT-4 cost over $100 million. It wouldn't be cheap, it wouldn't be easy, and I don't expect economic pressures to allow it at present.
Additionally, Large Language Models like GPT-3 and GPT-4 are not able to understand the concept of uncertainty. They will confidently spit out whatever information they have, not having any clue whether it's accurate or not. So, there will still be a dispatcher needed to review the generated information so long as those continue to be the state of the art AI. This means that all those millions you pour into developing your AI gets you very, very little in gains. So until someone develops something better than LLMs, it's not going to be bothered with.
And yes, I'm aware that FlightKeys claims to use AI to improve their output. I haven't personally seen how that works in practice, but the above two points still apply to that just as much as anything else, so my feeling is that it's most likely just marketing. After all, how many CS majors are there in this field that really understand much about state of the art AI? My guess is I'm one of a handful of those, and they figure they can easily dupe the rest of you.
Empennagie
Well-Known Member
Shock-Diamonds
Well-Known Member
I’m also a CS major, and while my remark was more sarcasm than alarm, things like working from home or anything where safety is relaxed can be a slippery slope. Even though I would give anything to live anywhere I want, or even just any base.
MT
Well-Known Member
If you think that’s a fallacy then I have oceanside property in Arizona to sell you. Our employers would send our jobs overseas in a split second to save a buck if they could.
Shock-Diamonds
Well-Known Member
Can’t see the jobs going overseas, I don’t think any industry would send safely/security critical jobs overseas for the slave labor wages. Not to mention communication is very important, so there’s the whole language thing… The human aspect of ‘flight following’ is where the job security is as far as getting replaced by AI in the future. Oh! Maybe AI will be our Dispatch Assistant, and we will just approve it’s work and finally have time to actually follow flights?
Flagship_dxer
Penske Material
A typical dispatch desk has 4 medium to large desktop monitors plus a monitor for the phone system. There are several speakers for the radios and operational announcements from managers, coordinators, etc. I would hate having my home space taken up by all that hardware. One of the great features of dispatch is the ability to leave work at work. Not sure why anyone would want to change that.
Home dispatching would make commuting even more challenging than it already is. It wont allow you to work from anywhere because there will always be a requirement to quickly report to the AOC should your home lose power or internet. You will need to maintain a home with a room for all the dispatch hardware close to the operations center. Most crashpads and roommate situations dont have the space or the quiet for this.
Home dispatching would make commuting even more challenging than it already is. It wont allow you to work from anywhere because there will always be a requirement to quickly report to the AOC should your home lose power or internet. You will need to maintain a home with a room for all the dispatch hardware close to the operations center. Most crashpads and roommate situations dont have the space or the quiet for this.
Steezus
Well-Known Member
A bigger waste is the time you spend driving to and from work. That is your life just going down the drain and it adds up to a very significant portion over the span of your career. Pretty easy to understand why giving up a bit of space in a home would be an easy tradeoff. You just wake up and you are at work. You get more sleep, more free time, less money spent towards your vehicle and commuting costs. Unless you really need to be around people at work, your mental health will definitely be improved if you can WFH.
Most people can easily turn off work when they log out of a computer. That is why so many are angry that companies are starting to recall their employees back to an office, people really like to WFH. Seems like productivity generally goes up as well.
I am not saying if this is right or wrong for dispatching. IMO this job will not go overseas as AI will be significantly changing this career much faster than most people realize and I think this goes for a lot of other careers and yes, it sucks.
Most people can easily turn off work when they log out of a computer. That is why so many are angry that companies are starting to recall their employees back to an office, people really like to WFH. Seems like productivity generally goes up as well.
I am not saying if this is right or wrong for dispatching. IMO this job will not go overseas as AI will be significantly changing this career much faster than most people realize and I think this goes for a lot of other careers and yes, it sucks.
Salkadi
Well-Known Member
My concern isn't our jobs being outsourced overseas. I don't see a lot of airlines wanting to contract out a critical job.
What scares me is the amount of automation that is coming down the pipe at many carriers now.
American is already implementing a flight planning system that can correctly apply the 1-2-3 rule with legal alternates. This system can read weather, NOTAMS and use preset company preferred alternates. SWA and JetBlue are in the process of bringing this system to their operations. There are also plans to automate a lot of the flight following function (think Fusion or Flight Explorer replacements). One of these companies bills itself as "waze of the skies."
All this automation won't eliminate the dispatch job but it will greatly reduce workload. Airlines would need 25% of the dispatchers they have now to do the same amount of work (or more) without an actual increase in dispatcher workload because all the automation is taking care of the easy stuff. Dispatchers will be needed to manage the "exceptional" cases. I think we're about at the peak of the numbers of dispatchers at airlines currently.
Tying this back to DispatchGPT, I'm not a computer science guy but I don't think it would be that hard to add (or hide) a machine learning algorithm to these programs. They could monitor how a dispatcher handles the exceptional cases and learn from that.
What scares me is the amount of automation that is coming down the pipe at many carriers now.
American is already implementing a flight planning system that can correctly apply the 1-2-3 rule with legal alternates. This system can read weather, NOTAMS and use preset company preferred alternates. SWA and JetBlue are in the process of bringing this system to their operations. There are also plans to automate a lot of the flight following function (think Fusion or Flight Explorer replacements). One of these companies bills itself as "waze of the skies."
All this automation won't eliminate the dispatch job but it will greatly reduce workload. Airlines would need 25% of the dispatchers they have now to do the same amount of work (or more) without an actual increase in dispatcher workload because all the automation is taking care of the easy stuff. Dispatchers will be needed to manage the "exceptional" cases. I think we're about at the peak of the numbers of dispatchers at airlines currently.
Tying this back to DispatchGPT, I'm not a computer science guy but I don't think it would be that hard to add (or hide) a machine learning algorithm to these programs. They could monitor how a dispatcher handles the exceptional cases and learn from that.
Shock-Diamonds
Well-Known Member
FPM already pre plans flights, adds legal alternates, reads NOTAMS, and chooses the optimal route. That’s not a new thing. There’s too many variables, and a big difference between legal and ideal.
ghostjet
Well-Known Member
Another threat of the coming wave of dispatch automaton of course is the subtle tendancy to lean toward complacency. When a system like Lido or FK applies the 1-2-3 rule to a TAF it does just exactly that. If 61 mins after your VFR ETA the soothsayers warn of FU BLDU +TSRAGS, you’re still legal. This scenario, though obviously exaggerated, is likely to play out comparably in numerous sticky situations the overloaded future dispatcher will find themselves in —as they struggle to wrangle 90 autogenerated flights on their board.
Surely, (hopefully) the latest versions of EuroSmart software will detect arcane forecast anomalies and nasty wx neatly disguised in routine TAFs, but the underlying danger is the same; an eventual propensity to implicitly trust AI’s decisions either because your new workload simply doesn’t allow time for careful analysis or even worse, they’re almost never wrong.
Surely, (hopefully) the latest versions of EuroSmart software will detect arcane forecast anomalies and nasty wx neatly disguised in routine TAFs, but the underlying danger is the same; an eventual propensity to implicitly trust AI’s decisions either because your new workload simply doesn’t allow time for careful analysis or even worse, they’re almost never wrong.
BobaGotBack
Well-Known Member
Aside from NetJets I don't know of any other dispatch adjacent jobs that allow WFH.
Sierra West allows it after training, per information I received for my spreadsheet.
