Launch Comment

With all the civil aviation and airline stories in the news lately, I decided to start this blog. In the last few months, we have had the Buffalo, NY crash, Sully's Hudson River landing, the new U.S. government rules for airlines, the NWA flight that overflew its destination and most recently the attempted bombing of a Delta/NWA flight and the runway overrun of an American Airlines flight in Kingston, Jamaica. I will comment on most of these in later posts.

In many cases of aviation or passenger incidents, a lot of the information from the major news outlets and other sources are one-sided or misinformed and I intend to comment on these events from my point of view. I may not know all the facts, but I can add my perspective as an industry insider.

I can provide a unique outlook because I have worked in airline flight operation centers for over eleven years. That gives me an "insider's" angle to the day-to-day tactics as well as what actions are taken when things go wrong. All airlines have operation centers that are responsible for keeping things on track. Most of these offices have representatives from maintenance, crew scheduling, flight dispatchers, customer service and system controllers. We all work as a team because when things go wrong, the responsibilities overlap and expertise from each discipline is usually required to get the system back to normal.

Most airline travelers are unaware that these centers even exist, but they are where the decisions are made that effect their journey. In all cases, safety is first, customers are second, and economics is a third priority. I am not an automatic apologist for the decisions airlines make in certain situations, but I hope I can explain why some actions were taken. Making an airline work smoothly is a monumental task with all the unpredictable outside factors that can impact operations. It is a delicate coordination between many diverse groups that must be repeated day after day!

Most airline flight operations offices resemble NASA mission control to varying degrees. People huddled over  computer monitors and usually large system monitors on the walls. An example is shown in the photo below.