Refueling Over Afghanistan? There’s An App For That
 

U.S. Air Force uses ‘Jigsaw’ to help streamline tanker planning in the air campaign against ISIS

Snip from the Aviation Week article:-
Obviously helps to have friends in high places / financial clout etc.

Having once chased the only drogue tanker sausage side all over the bloody map when it wasn't within 200 miles of the briefed towline I'd like the app please.

A white board is great - everyone can see it, it's not dependent on electricity or dodgy computers, you can't hack it, it doesn't require training to use it, it's cheap, recyclable and it's a LOT bigger than the average PC screen

Often people deploy technology because they think it's modern rather than because the old ways aren't working

Thank you Harry, for summing up my response to that Silicon Valley ******.

Lady Harry spent half her life in IT trying to STOP people from going to a high tech solution "because it was there"

I'm currently arguing with a client who wants a"hi tech electronic white board" - someone suggested it would be easier to use the manual version and just all take a picture on our mobile phones once we'd agreed..............

Is there a PLAN!? :rolleyes:

OAP

Aye, Aye - if it 'ain't broke, don't fix it.

I guess everyone has come across the white boards that allow you to sketch and write at will and then print off the contents of the board to a sheet of A4. It sat for years in a corner of a little used conference room before being dragged away one night and buried in a skip. No mourning, no requiem, just faded into obscurity. Mobile phone cameras did for it.

Imagegear

Black Buck
 

Now there was a fuel plan!

All done with a 4-function pocket calculator and a lot of intelligent thinking. Oh, and bits of papers and several biros.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped...black.buck.svg

On the other hand it lends itself to being able to allow those requesting AAR to do real time updates to requests; to do what if planning on the fly without another white board which can be circulated for inputs before being incorporated; to show locked in segments for those Ready airborne (so they don’t end up chasing 200nm across country for tankers that aren’t there; it allows almost immediate incorporation into the ATO and changes; electronic transfer to other media for exchange; and of course storage of the original plan and all messages and changes so that it is available for investigation if something goes wrong.

Apart from that, the whiteboard is better....

Back in the day the USAF crews would book their F-111s into the Tac Route and be told 'you will overtake a Jet Provost between EP X and EP Y. They were convinced that the RAF had some pretty heavyweight computing power in the 1970s.

Apparently their faces were a picture on visits to the cell when they saw the perspex boards with time/EP graphs and the chinagraph lines crossing at the overtake point.

Pah - you want to see an old railway Timetabling diagram for Victoria Station routes....................... all done by hand on graph paper

Then someone turns the power off............

Off to plan my sortie; now where's my Dalton gone.......?

Don't forget string, there had to be string.

Whiteboards are great, until someone leans on it and scuffs off the work. The culprit is usually easy to find from the red/blue/black/green marks on their shoulders or back....

I remember seeing a film of how they used to plan railway timetables along routes. with each train's "path" shown by a length of string stretched across a lot of pins on a big sheet of paper. As long as no two lengths of string crossed, all was well!

Yes and when using graph paper they pre-formed templates for each type of train with the correct accel/deaccel/ cruising speed. Just place on paper and draw line...

For those who can remember "Flow Control" running the numbers of transport aircraft allowed through Akrotiri, Gan etc - that was done using a variety of wooden blocks in a frame.

UPS and generators help.

It was always lots of fun watching people go from board to board, room to room, trying to cadge some markers which still worked. Even more fun when they found out they were permanent and not erasable......

If you do this stuff for a while from basics and MDR, it gets to the stage where you can do complex plans, off the cuff Trails, live re-routed Trails (:eek: ), ETP, LPD, PNR, predicted available offload/time/range and achievable give etc.. pretty accurately while still flying your party tanker. ;) . However, if you have always pressed buttons for your answers, you are completely fcuked when the button falls off. :ooh:

OAP

Priceless :D