I currently work for a small airline with a fleet of 10 aircraft in their OCC. 1 person controls crewing and the other controls operations/dispatch. Its gets busy at times, but nothing out of control.

My question is firstly how do larger multi fleeted airlines (ca 100 a/c for example) control their operations? As in surely all of the aircraft cycles couldn't be displayed at the same time in the manner that I currently do across a couple of computer screens.

And secondly, how are these staffed? Does one person control x number of aircraft, or specific regions or just a group of people working together dealing with one issue at a time?

As you can guess, my goal is get into one of these larger operations centres. Any tips or advice from those in the larger carriers?

Thanks in advance for all your answers!

Recently and maybe still the case, a large Orange airline operations control centre was laid out as follows:

Ops officer for LGW fleet
Ops officer(s) for EU fleet
Ops Communicator I believe looked after the Swiss fleet of aircraft

A flight planner looked after flight planning and ATC using LIDO flight planning software.

Not to sure about crewing as I think there have been allot of changes of late

Brgds,

In "my" outfit crewing and ops are two different entities in two different companies and they reside in two different towns around 500km apart. They plan for around 170 airframes and roughly 2000 pilots and 4 to 5000 flight attendants spread over four companies in three different countries all operating under EU-OPS but different collective agreements with aircraft types ranging from Dash 8 to A330.

Crewing is split into three big divisions, crew planning, crew control and crew travel management.

Crew planning is split into two sub divisions. Crew routing has around 4 employees, long term scheduling 13.
Crew Control is split into three sub divisions, the short term scheduling team has 3 members, crew contact 22 and rotation control 2, additionally there are six supervisors.
Crew travel management again has three sub divisions with crew traveling being the biggest while crew travel service and crew travel controlling have the same size.

OPS or OCC is another huge affair with several divisions, traffic center, dispatch, pax control and punctuality management. Traffic center is by far the biggest and handles movement and slot control as well as shift/duty management, second biggest is pax control, third is dispatch which handles long term dispatch and flight planning coordination and smallest is punctuality management.

Since two independent entities are not entirely efficient i expect quite some changes there, especially as the whole mess is probably going into administration soon, not least due to very inefficient crewing and ops control.

Crew and aircraft management is done using AIMS, flight planning is using LIDO.