Chapter B, Problem 1.2VC

Summary Introduction

Introduction:

Proper scheduling of airlines is very important for delivering high quality customer service and maintains high utilization rates of airplanes. The scheduling system begins 330 days prior at Company A airlines. The company sends schedules to human resource, repairs, operations, customer service, marketing and other departments.

The company aims to reach remote town in city A which is difficult due to the external reasons such as poor weather conditions, underdeveloped infrastructure system of the city and lack of man power to operate airports.

With the SABRE optimizing system, crew optimizer, tries to remove unwanted layovers and crew unproductive time and union restriction. Over 3,000 flight attendants and 1,500 pilots rank their preferred routing on monthly basis. Some pilots or flight attendants prefer taking challenging routes through city K, S, J, F, A and back to S which keeps them linked with the culture and local residents.

The company A airlines decided to test with a schedule in S to C route with crew restrictions on flying hours per day where the flight had crew layover previously at place C. The company analyst commented that running same crew for two 4-hours round trip had 98.7%, the crew would not time out.

To determine: The operational considerations which prohibit Company A from adding flight and more cities to its network.