Hello Celestar;
Excellent comments.
It sounds like you have a professional operation, especially with the type of operations that you are conducting. I respect that you disagree with me. We can agree to disagree.
When you send those flights to Easter Island and to Anadyr, is there always someone legally responsible to provide those flights with critical changes in operational information? Is there a separate communication system with ops control/dispatch over the entire route of the flight?
One of my colleagues was speaking to a Captain for an airline that has similar long range operations that operates under similar rules that I believe your airline does. He asked them how they found out about changes enroute? He replied that they found out when they got there. That is the crux of the problem.
You make some interesting comments about the Swiss operation and the Ryanair incident. They are both interesting and I would like to respond about them.
The Swiss may have certified dispatchers, who do flight planning, but the flight from Basel to Hamburg had no flight monitoring or flight watch system. ATC vectored the flight right into the front side of the severe weather that day and the crew wound up in that severe weather with no available airports to land at as they diverted towards Berlin, which also closed. The aircraft did not have ACARS/communications capability. Just because a flight is within Europe and is less distance or time than long haul flights does not mean it should have less support.
In the US, for example, every scheduled flight with more than 9 seats is required to have a flight dispatch system with flight monitoring/communications and joint responsibility between the PIC and the dispatcher. It could be 10 minutes flight time or ten hours and that requirement applies. This also ensures that flights are routed around severe weather routinely. US flight dispatchers also have excellent tools, such as the Aircraft Situation Display, which is near real time track info from ATC, to see where their aircraft are, and the weather, airports, other flights ,etc are also superimposed on the display. As far as I know, this is not used in Europe except where some dispatchers are able to access US sites for some info on their flights. What I often find with European carriers is that they usually give more support to “long haul” flights but that intra-European flights are often given very little support at all.
An interesting issue is that if the Swiss dispatchers have FAA licenses, then the question is what is their legal responsibility? As I recall, the Swiss themselves have a flight dispatcher license. An FAA license in Switzerland provides a knowledge qualification of some value, but it is not a legal qualification recognized in Europe or Switzerland. And the problem is that JAR-OPS does not require any license/certificate. That is what this discussion is all about. So the fact that the Swiss may have FAA licenses doesn’t help the operation when it comes to legal responsibility or authority. And if they have a Swiss license, then they still have no authority or responsibility under JAR-OPS.
If there had been a Swiss dispatcher with legal authority and responsibility and communications, they could have guided the flight, supported it with critical information, or even prevented it from operating and ensured that it never got into the situation that it wound up in.
Regarding the Ryanair incident with the Notams, this is also interesting. Only the pilot is legally responsible to check them, as there is no license or certification in the UK for flight dispatchers. The company can of course assign the task to a flight dispatcher but in effect it is the pilot who is legally responsible to the national authority. This means that, as you point out, the flight dispatcher does not sign anything, as they are not responsible for anything. Therein lies the problem. I can tell you that when someone is certificated/licensed and has to sign their name to an official document, they take a very different view of their responsibility and the possible ramifications if they make an error.
I understand what you are saying about the fact that both the PIC and the dispatcher missed that Notam. This could happen even under a joint system, but it is much less likely. There was a human factors study done at Ohio State University regarding this very issue. There were several scenarios, one with severe weather/thunderstorm avoidance and one with an MEL problem. The testing was done in three ways to measure results: 1, with just the pilot making decisions, 2, with the just the flight dispatcher making decisions, and 3, with both of them making decisions together. Neither of the ones with just the pilot or dispatcher making their own decisions was nearly as effective as the one where they both made decisions together. The best and safest results by far were with a joint responsibility/decision system.
Think of it like a three-legged stool. One leg is the PIC, another is the ATC system and the 3rd is Flight Dispatch. If there are only 2 legs, then it simply cannot be as safe.
I think of it in the way everything else in aviation is done. That of redundancy. Transports must have multiple engines, multiple systems and performance margins for a very important reason. Redundancy. If one engine fails, as we know it eventually must, then there are one or more additional ones to keep the aircraft in the air. If there is a hydraulic or electrical failure, then there are multiple backups for those as well. It is called a fail-safe system, where no one failure is allowed to cause an accident. Yet, in operational control systems that do not have flight monitoring and joint responsibility, that is not the case. We know from studies and long experience, that a joint responsibility flight dispatch system with flight watch/flight monitoring definitely provides that fail-safe redundancy to operational control. Flight crews get better information, and errors in judgment are minimized. It doesn’t mean that it is perfect. It is possible, as you point out for both the PIC and the flight dispatcher to miss something. But it is also known that the two together are safer when they work together as a professional team than when they are on their own.
You mentioned the workload issue. That is a continuing concern. Airlines typically will staff for the “clear weather” day. There have been cases in the US where FAA inspectors would “encourage” the airline to make an adjustment when they saw that there was a workload problem. Duty rigs also help to lessen fatigue issues, but these are usually minimal in their effect. When workload is still a problem, however, flight dispatchers may have to make a choice between prioritizing the flight in the air versus the flight on the ground, and delays could result. I think that this will always be a problem, especially in a deregulated environment with highly competitive pressures. We agree on this.
Having said this, whether we agree or not, I think that this thread is a valuable dialogue. Your comments are very well presented.
What I would suggest is that there is an opportunity to continue this dialogue in person in October. There will be a meeting of EUFALDA, the European Federation of Airline Dispatcher's Associations, in Austria on October 19-21. Their web site is at
www.eufalda.org. You can check there for information on the meeting. I think that you and other professionals in who are interested in recent developments in operational control/flight dispatch and want to participate would find it valuable to attend.
Thanks.
Kellmark