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Hi all, please see this major site announcement: https://www.boards.ie/discussion/2058427594/boards-ie-2026
The great big "ask an airline pilot" thread!
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Are you really 16 years old? You ask some extremely interesting questions
I'm interested to know a little more about the flight planning systems. Is this just a standalone solution or is it integrated with the aircraft computer? And, is it just for planning? What I mean is, are any actual values recorded and compared against the plan (so we can see how wrong we got wind speed etc.)?
Finally, do all airlines use the same flight planning systems, or are there a number of providers?
I'm going to guess here that Lockheed (Aircraft manufacturer, builder of L1011 Tristar) were one of the first developers of a flight planning system, they later became Lockheed Memrykord and then Jeppesen, who are now one of the bigger providers of flight planning software. The older versions were standalone and were pretty hit and miss due to the lack of computing power and available data.
Now a lot of the systems are integrated, so the weight control adds the payload and exact fuel to the Computerised flight plan prior to the flight, this is combined with fuel costs for departure and destination and aircraft costs to provide a speed schedule based on cost efficiency. The captain and dispatcher agree on the flight fuel etc. Once onboard and everything loaded, a final flight plan is uploaded directly to the FMS. After the flight, the original fuel plan and the actual fuel plan are compared to assess the differences, this in turn can lead to fuel or drag biases getting added to that specific aircraft tail number as part of a larger performance monitoring program.
Some airlines have in-house flight planning systems, other providers are Lufthansa LIDO, Sabre with their crap system, Sabre with their recently purchased FWZ system and some company in Sweden who's name i can never remember.
smurfjed0 -
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I hate jetlag..... 5am in the morning and I'm wide awake, pick up in 4 hours
I asked this question to a friend who flies the A320, we have over 40 of them, he replied that he didn't usually know which aircraft that he was on, and that the only difference for him was remembering that some had more fuel than others. But as they are all set up the same, and with an operating policy that just about has the autopilot on 99% of the time, he really doesn't see a difference between them.
As for me, i have 6 aircraft to choose from, and we hand fly a lot more, the joys of not having active flight dating monitoring systems. And yes we know which aircraft flies nicer, which one is slightly out of rigging, which one always a "X" fault on startup etc, and which one has the best interior for the route. For example, the aircraft coming up to the UK today has the largest number of seats, it has 2 long sofa's that have plenty of room underneath them for storing shopping, so in about 30 minutes I'm heading to Tesco to stock up. We have another that has a double bed in the aft cabin, just perfect for long deadhead flights, and another with a shower. So depending on where we are going, the selection of aircraft can make a nice difference to us.
smurfjed0 -
On the point of knowing what to expect from individual aircraft, a friend who used to be on the 146 knew exactly how much extra rudder trim they would need above and beyond what would be required anyway, once they saw the reg. Apparently some needed quite the extra touch
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Are you really 16 years old? You ask some extremely interesting questions
Sadly not. You can pretty much double that
I'm just a bit of a nerd with an interest in numbers and aviation!
To continue the theme, how good would you say commercial airlines are at performance monitoring?
Is it something in your opinion saves airlines money or, in reality, do the practicalities of running a large (or any size) airline mean that for all the monitoring and planning in the world, unexpected stuff happens and tail numbers are swapped last minute making monitoring and planning of routes by tail number meaningless?
Also, are those grapes seedless?0 -
For what they cost, i would have expected them to be covered in gold leaf
In the older days, Performance Monitoring was done by basically having the crew complete a cruise report form showing engine parameters, speed, altitude, temperature etc. The analysis itself was based on trends, so you had to have a lot of readings in order to weed out any anomalies, such as the station manager loading up furniture for his new house. I would actually say that this was more detrimental to the airlines than beneficial as the resulting deteriorations and increase in fuel burns lead to increased average fuel biases and the requirement to carry more fuel.
As technology improved and the cost of transmitting the data became affordable, now we got into the world of automated aircraft performance readings and engine condition monitoring. With these programs in place, the ability was there to reduce the inflight contingency fuel figures from the standard figure of 10% to a figure ascertained from the monitoring, so fuel savings finally started to appear. In the last few years tail number flight planning started to appear, this meant that the flight plan fuel was based on that specific aircrafts fuel burns rather than a fleet average, I know that we don't assign aircraft to a specific flight due to fuel burns, and i don't know if any airline actually does that, i would assume that any aircraft that was below the fleet average would be inspected in accordance with the manufacturers fuel conservation maintenance programs as its certainly not in the airlines interest to accept increased fuel burns for one specific aircraft.
smurfjed.0 -
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