AA Dispatchers

[Dxwiz]

Did you miss the part where they don't have to change the regs? And their 'oversight' brought you SMART, so........

 

[TheFlyingNun]

Is this more than Delta when you factor in their license override and profit sharing?

Delta def makes more in profit sharing, however this top out of $230,000 I calculated beats Deltas top out of I think around $197k, but that might be wrong. I even missed another 3% somewhere so the pay is actually even higher now than what I first said for AA. And this does not include their qualification overrides either. But also AA works far less hours a year than Delta or United. So now they’re making more and working less.

It does concern me there was no AI protection. Makes me wonder why a company with financial struggles agreed to pay so much. Unless they’re planning to make some cuts possibly down the road. But that’s just speculation and I certainly hope not. Happy for AA dispatchers.

 

[TAF_Master]

Did you miss the part where they don't have to change the regs? And their 'oversight' brought you SMART, so........

"No person" may dispatch a flight.... the regs don't say program, they say person.

160 flights, 1500 flights planned whatever the number is...the dispatcher is still responsible for flight following, advising the PIC and diverting if the flight cannot continue safely...is AI so good that it can fulfill that function? Is AI so good that it can detect issues ahead and provide reroutes with specific waypoints to follow? Is it so good it can provide tops of thunderstorms and differentiate the green radar returns from the red ones?... Or is it just changing alternates that go illegal?

 

[flynryan692]

Is it so good it can provide tops of thunderstorms and differentiate the green radar returns from the red ones?... Or is it just changing alternates that go illegal?

I googled a generic map with tops being reported and asked ChatGPT to read the map for me. It read it. Turns out a generic public model can do it pretty well, so I'd wager a guess that if you built something targeted for aviation it'd work well.

I'm not trying to be a jerk, but downplaying AI is a really dumb move at this point. It's going to find its way into the dispatch environment, unions should be finding ways to balance its usefulness while protecting dispatchers.

 

[TEMPO]

"No person" may dispatch a flight.... the regs don't say program

160 flights, 1500 flights planned whatever the number is...the dispatcher is still responsible for flight following, advising the PIC and diverting if the flight cannot continue safely...is AI so good that it can fulfill that function?

I never said there won’t be dispatchers. I’m just saying that our collective workload is about to increase, reducing the number of dispatchers needed in the industry. Chances are most of our carriers already planted the seed for that by going along with vendors that decided to treat abnormal events as “exceptions”.

Let’s dig in to a typical weather scenario. Systems today can read weather, read NOTAMs, detect arrival demand, see flights holding, calculate the burn to any number of alternates, then give a crew and dispatcher a bingo fuel. How long would it take you to do that for 5 flights? 10? 15? Then what happens when you fill one diversion airport in the process? The computer isn’t getting mentally exhausted. And, frankly, it’s a safer operation to let it make all those calculations and have the dispatcher work with the output.

That is where dispatchers should be working hard in this new world to inject themselves into the operation for safety’s sake. Make a firm distinction between the calculation and the decision. Put the dispatcher between those two to be a set of human eyes and a sniff test. Right now, the momentum from corporate folks and (I hate to say it) pilots is to ship all of the info to the flight deck (because the bandwidth is there now) and let the crew sort it out. Dispatchers need to develop a cohesive argument to stay in the loop that’s way more robust than “because the rules say so.” Then the next part of that argument needs to be commanding pay higher than most management employees.

Again, the regs have been firmly in place with SMART’s rollout. That should be a wake up call to everyone. The regs aren’t going to save your job. Having a solid argument about your role in safety decisions, not as a calculator, is what will.

Is AI so good that it can detect issues ahead and provide reroutes with specific waypoints to follow? Is it so good it can provide tops of thunderstorms and differentiate the green radar returns from the red ones?... Or is it just changing alternates that go illegal?

It sounds like you haven’t met Flyways yet. And it’s not even ready for primetime.