AIRLINE OPERATIONS CONTROL
Introduction
Airline Operations Control is considered as one of the most important department in any airline company. Through its defined mechanism, the airline is able to monitor all the flights checking and ensures that the prearranged schedule defined by other departments of the company, is being followed. To achieve that, the Airline Operations Control Centre (AOCC) is given a mandate to manage the airline operations during specific time depending. Its size and composition varies according to each airline company (Clausen et al., 2005). The AOCC constitutes of different teams of people specializing in a variety of fields and these teams work together to solve problems. Under the supervision of operations control manager, teams make every effort to have airline operations running with as less problems as possible. The specialized teams, which may include among others such as aircraft maintenance, crew scheduling and aircraft scheduling, monitor the schedule execution and try to solve all the problems related with crew members, aircraft and passengers. However, some problems may arise and disrupt the planned schedule. Nevertheless, there is a process fallowed to solve such problems that’s known as Disruption Management (Kohl et al., 2004) or Operations Recovery.
Barnhart et al., (2003, p. 47) stated that during the normal operations, airlines keep on monitoring their operations and when something odd within the schedule happens, e.g. that might be a crew member not reporting for duty for example; or there is a bad weather condition, an evaluation is conducted to verify if there’s a need to do something depending on seriousness of the problem. Yet, minor problems like flight delay need no action. Where there is a need to take action, possible solutions will be evaluated based on passengers, crew and aircraft perspective. After