More DFH news

I think DFH is a potential game changer for airline management. They can use the threat of return to the office to extract concessions from dispatchers. For a non union airline like Skywest, it can help keep union off property by threatening to end DFH if they vote in a union. If there are enough dispatchers that are comfortable in their DFH situation, they will make sacrifices to keep working from home. In this business, you never get anything without giving something up in return.
 
Flagship_dxer said:
I think DFH is a potential game changer for airline management. They can use the threat of return to the office to extract concessions from dispatchers. For a non union airline like Skywest, it can help keep union off property by threatening to end DFH if they vote in a union. If there are enough dispatchers that are comfortable in their DFH situation, they will make sacrifices to keep working from home. In this business, you never get anything without giving something up in return.
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Meanwhile at Republic…
 
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Flagship_dxer said:
I think DFH is a potential game changer for airline management. They can use the threat of return to the office to extract concessions from dispatchers. For a non union airline like Skywest, it can help keep union off property by threatening to end DFH if they vote in a union. If there are enough dispatchers that are comfortable in their DFH situation, they will make sacrifices to keep working from home. In this business, you never get anything without giving something up in return.
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100% true. But it goes much further than that.
Today you dispatch from home. Next week someone overseas is dispatching your flights for pennies on the dollar.
 
Empennagie said:
I love it, it's amazing the things people come up with for "the dangers" of dispatch from home.
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Mhm, and the same talking points that get proven wrong every time this gets brought up are yet again being brought up. There isn't a discussion to be had on this subject because nobody wants to have it in good faith. It feels like trying to discuss politics, and that's just...yuck.
 
flynryan692 said:
Mhm, and the same talking points that get proven wrong every time this gets brought up are yet again being brought up. There isn't a discussion to be had on this subject because nobody wants to have it in good faith. It feels like trying to discuss politics, and that's just...yuck.
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What’s there to discuss in good faith? Our employers would outsource every single job in the company, save the officers, to make more profit; including ours.
Our jobs are relatively safer from that because we have to report to a single office, in a single city.
If you want to see your job outsourced, then just prove to the company that it can be done remotely. Once that’s done, it doesn’t matter if the remote site is across the street or 7000 miles away.
Prove me wrong that our companies wouldn’t move our jobs overseas if given the opportunity.
 
MT said:
Prove me wrong that our companies wouldn’t move our jobs overseas if given the opportunity.
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Definitely can't prove you wrong. If not for the regs, our jobs would likely have been outsourced years ago. Look at meteorologists for an example...several of the big majors once had their own team of them, working directly for the airline. Today they are contractors working for a different company. (I am unsure if DL still has its own meteorologists on staff, but I know that UA switched to contract employees several years ago, and I think AA did as well.)
 
manniax said:
DL still has its own meteorologists on staff,
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There are a couple of contractors. Most of them are in house though. They all work in the OCC. Of course, my information is from 2019. Could have changed.
 
manniax said:
Definitely can't prove you wrong. If not for the regs, our jobs would likely have been outsourced years ago. Look at meteorologists for an example...several of the big majors once had their own team of them, working directly for the airline. Today they are contractors working for a different company. (I am unsure if DL still has its own meteorologists on staff, but I know that UA switched to contract employees several years ago, and I think AA did as well.)
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Yep AA out sourced quite a few years ago. Then their is WN that has continued to value in house weather nerds and actually just grew the size of their meteorology group a sizeable chunk now that they have EWINS. DL still has a team on property and fairly sure both FX and 5X both also have an in house team as well.
 
MT said:
What’s there to discuss in good faith? Our employers would outsource every single job in the company, save the officers, to make more profit; including ours.
Our jobs are relatively safer from that because we have to report to a single office, in a single city.
If you want to see your job outsourced, then just prove to the company that it can be done remotely. Once that’s done, it doesn’t matter if the remote site is across the street or 7000 miles away.
Prove me wrong that our companies wouldn’t move our jobs overseas if given the opportunity.
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I think it is reasonable to assume companies will take every cost saving step they possibly can, they'd get rid of pilots if they could, I'll come back to that one. Dispatch jobs are safe today because of regulations requiring airlines to have dispatchers, and regulations like 121.533 that define the dispatchers shared and sole responsibilities. DFH isn't dispatch from anywhere, it's from home, there is still a requirement to be able to get up and move into the office at a moments notice for any reason. We don't need to debate the logistics of how that impacts the dispatchers already in the office, I think that varies from one company to another. The various restrictions the FAA has placed surrounding DFH are good and protect dispatch jobs.

Letting people dispatch from their home a few miles away from the OCC is much less of a threat to your job than AI and technology that already exists to do your job for you. Swiss uses (or used, maybe they have the new LIDO stuff now) the same version of FPM in use at United, Spirit, and jetblue and their "dispatchers" never touch a flight. It's an exception for them to mess with what FPM gives them. LIDO's next gen products are designed to read the weather and make determinations like whether to have an alternate or not, legal to go, etc, it's supposed to do the work and the "dispatcher" just reviews it and sends it. There is no thought or skill in that. I can recall an article about Alaska having AI in their flight planning systems. Flightkeys advertises "5D flight planning" and uses the phrase "fully automated cost driven" on their own website. You're worried about somebody dispatching in the sweatpants and flip flops 4 miles from the OCC while the true threat to DX jobs is the automation being built into software everyday. The better and more reliable software like that gets the more likely the FAA is to pull back what the Dispatcher does, nullify the importance of the job. I'd put big money on that tech costing dispatch jobs before DFH ever does.

I mentioned airlines would get rid of pilots if they could. This was just posted about moving to airliners being flown by one pilot. EASA is studying the concept. It's not new and obviously there are a lot of objections, but it just goes to show how far tech can go these days. I think we'll see an icrease in the size of planes that can be flown single pilot, but it will take a while before it reaches airliners. DFH isn't the threat you think it is, it is the technology that threatens jobs across the aviation industry.

Here is that full quote from the Flightkeys website...

We believe that features like fully automated cost driven route optimization, correct application of the cost index concept, management by exception, fuel tankering, EDTO, Terrain avoidance scenarios, precise enroute charges computation, tailored NOTAM and weather briefings, consideration of weather hazards, and more are basic features and do not have to be explained in detail. FLIGHTKEYS 5D is extending these standard features with probabilistic (the 5fth) dimensions, environmental sustainability functions and enhanced in-flight trajectory management and drives basic capabilities even further.
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fsxflyhigh said:
Yep AA out sourced quite a few years ago. Then their is WN that has continued to value in house weather nerds and actually just grew the size of their meteorology group a sizeable chunk now that they have EWINS. DL still has a team on property and fairly sure both FX and 5X both also have an in house team as well.
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Different airlines do things different ways, sure. It just seems like that when times were tough (Chapter 11 or whatever) many airlines chose to go the contractor route for meteorology to save money. I'm sure that this would have been tried with dispatch, if the regs allowed it.

As far as DFH goes, I'm not surprised that the regionals were the first ones to push for it, as they likely have the most cost pressure from their major partners and are always looking for ways to save money. I don't know why it's been expanded or allowed to continue post-pandemic by the FAA, though...the whole concept seems wildly unsafe to me.
 
flynryan692 said:
I think it is...
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You should see the flight plans I've seen that were produced under "full automation"... erratic cost index changes in flight, no ETPs or ETOPs applied, step climb profile looking like the silhouette of the Himalayas, and the closest legal alternate while technically legal, was also dumb as • to use.

The talking points you allude to in this thread are valid concerns and there's no reason to add more holes in the cheese, simply because you find it troublesome to get dressed and drive "4 miles to the OCC". The benefits of remote dispatching will never outweigh the risks, both in regard to safety and job security. So quite frankly, if you want to work from home, go find a different career.
 
AKSledhead said:
You should see the flight plans I've seen that were produced under "full automation"... erratic cost index changes in flight, no ETPs or ETOPs applied, step climb profile looking like the silhouette of the Himalayas, and the closest legal alternate while technically legal, was also dumb as • to use.

The talking points you allude to in this thread are valid concerns and there's no reason to add more holes in the cheese, simply because you find it troublesome to get dressed and drive "4 miles to the OCC". The benefits of remote dispatching will never outweigh the risks, both in regard to safety and job security. So quite frankly, if you want to work from home, go find a different career.
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Boom!
 
Just wait until people start getting Flight Keys. It still has a ways to go for it to have full automation. Eurocontrol invented a new error in their validation system specifically for Flight Keys. Not only that, but it's insistence on always using STARs creates some interesting pictures when you plot out the route.
 
I use automation in my current airline, and while it isn't perfect, it's clearly the real danger. With just a little refinement we went from a useless option to something that generally makes a pretty good release. I could see more work being put in and getting results that are near human levels of intelligence.
 
Empennagie said:
I use automation in my current airline, and while it isn't perfect, it's clearly the real danger. With just a little refinement we went from a useless option to something that generally makes a pretty good release. I could see more work being put in and getting results that are near human levels of intelligence.
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That's not really how computers work. Getting them to do the basics is relatively easy and quick. You can refine that into perfect handling of most jobs, 75-90% of the time, in relatively short order. But replacing humans for the remaining part is not just much harder, but actually currently an insurmountable task.

Theoretically, it would be possible to train a neural network to do much of the work of dispatching, potentially even that last 10-25% (at great expense, mind you). But the danger of neural networks is that they are not auditable. You can't really know exactly how they're breaking the problem down, or what little issues might trip them up. In short, they're not actually suitable for safety-critical applications. There will always need to be humans watching the output and correcting it, no matter how good the automation is. And given that humans are bad at managing automation in that way, especially weird, inconsistent failures of automation as you would see from this 'experiment', that means it's safer to have the human do it from the start.
 
I have to ask the question, openly, Does our job become more important or less when flights are single pilot? There’s no reason to doubt that single pilot will happen sooner or later. When it does, I have no doubt in my mind that our job’s importance doubles.

Right now, the Captain signs to verify the flight plan is safe and legal, but in every crew ready room I’ve been in or flight I’ve jumpsat on, the FO reviews the paperwork as well.

In what world does our job not become more vital to safety? We have 2 people with operational control but 3 people reviewing every decision. When we cut FOs from the equation eventually, there will be an increase to the importance of good dispatching. Dispatch by exception, i.e. let the computer flight plan and only fix what you’re told is broken, is years away but also far less logical in regards to safety when only a single pilot is reviewing paperwork.

Additionally, working from home with its unlimited complications, both foreseeable and unforeseeable, may be acceptable within the current safety parameters to some at the FAA today but cannot be once we transition to single pilot. For a very long period of time we can expect single pilot to operate fairly when when all goes well on a flight, yet be incredibly high stress when it doesn’t. DFH compounds how stressful situations can and will be, given many scenarios single pilots will face.

When there are communication problems with the Dispatcher and Captain, he isn’t going to have an FO to monitor the radio and assist in flying the plane while the dispatcher gets their internet fixed. He will need to be running checklists alone going through QRHs solo all while avoiding CFIT. God forbid avoidable issues that have actually occurred with DFH happens in one of those situations.

When in the current operation of aircraft the FO catches an error in paperwork, brings up a valid safety concern, or helps in any possible pretakeoff way, they won’t be there to do so. We will instead be relying on automation to not only replace much of what a Dispatcher does but also entirely the FO.

We want to have this conversation in two half’s but it’s not enough. Use the vision so many intelligently do to look ahead 10 years at DFH while single pilot. Take it to the worst of the worst situation so stressful that the single pilot Captain is about to have a coronary. You’ve got a seat in the back with your family while an emergency happens up front. Do you seriously want the Captain to struggle to hear his dispatcher because his dog is barking? Or how about the dispatcher is also parenting their kid and misses the emergency altogether for several minutes? How about AT&T is conducting unscheduled internet service and half way through a crisis a new dispatcher has to play catch up because the other doesn’t have internet.

You cannot tell me truthfully it’s overall safer, you cannot tell me it’s safer beyond normal conditions. I can tell you that there’s more variables, and with more variables there’s less safety. That’s it in a nutshell, like it or not.
 
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