American Airlines Virtual

I was wondering if the VA could use some dispatchers. Maybe we could have people who arent flying who are more staff members if some would be dispatchers for our flights. So lets say I wanted to a flight from MIA to LAX I would contact him either via email or through the va website for information such as weights,weather and everything else and let him or her file the flight plan. It was only an idea. Any thoughts or suggestions??
Kyle

Hey Kyle. I first want to thank you for coming forward with an idea that you had. We encourage pilots to express ideas to better our VA and flight experiences here at AAV. However I'm not sure if this would really work due to most of us here at AAV have full time jobs and family at home and this sounds like someone or a team of someones that would have to be online like all the time when flight requests come in which I'm not sure if that would work. Secondly I have never filed a flightplan for someone else. Can you even do that? It's a good suggestion, just one that I think would require alot of time to make it work. Just my $.02 worth.

My very personal opinion is that I prefer to do all that stuff myself. I find the fun and satisfaction in taking a zero fuel aircraft adding some payload and then figuring out how to get it from point A to point B safely, on schedule and without excess fuel. Sure the actual flying is fun too, but being able to put that puzzle together is fun for me too. It takes some work, sometimes I spend just as much time planning a flight as I do actually flying it, but to me it's worth it. I've also learned a ton in the process. Just my humble two cents.

My personal opinion is based on my experience dealing with dispatchers when I'm at work. It's kind of a love/hate relationship and I'm pretty sure that when they can the dispatchers choose the most inconvenient of all available options. I know in reality that this is not true but when you are arguing with them via the FMS ACARS or a radio patch via Atlanta Radio about 'most suitable alternates' or 'dispatching with deferred equipment' or 'continuing or diverting' it's easy to quickly feel as if they are the enemy. My most recently lost argument earned me a 32hr sit in Sun Valley due to an overly cautious dispatcher.

That said I like the idea of flight dispatchers but I think most like to do their own flight planning and implementing a scheduled 'live' system would be hard for most. Thanks for bringing this idea to the table.

Greg

Well you are right Kent, I think the Hub Managers are going to jump in on this one as I am right now. I don't think it's a matter of us jumping in and saying your taking away from our workload here at AAV as hub managers. However like Bert said earlier that most pilots including myself like to sit down, plan out our routes, fuel required for the flight based on payload and wind conditions, and filing the flightplan ourselves. By implementing an automated system your taking all of this away. Now I know your going to come back and say in real life there are dispatchers that do this for you. That is true, but not all the time. Sometimes the pilots do plan their own flights and sometimes dispatchers do it for them and sometimes they fight I know that too. I just think for the sake of Virtual, it's more of a challenge for pilots to figure out the best route to consume the least amount of fuel between points A and B and I think most pilots here would back this up. Having a system do this for them so they can just jump in the plane and go without any planning is too easy in my opinion.

I think the program that would have the fuel burn,payload and route is the VAFS program. Even thought it is a va I think we could still add new features for some pilots and staff members that wouldn't mind it.

I'm not against the implemtation of new programs that would further the VA, in fact I'm all for them. Also Kent did bring up some valid points about having a program that could give us payload information as well as cargo information because those are crucial information for the pilot to have. I'm not contesting that. The only thing I was contesting is having a team of dispatchers that you have to file through to get this information I feel would be really hard to get to work because of real life commitments. If there is a program that could provide this info that we could implement into our VA, then I'm all for that. Just wanted to clear up a few things here.

What if we took vafs and changed and added features to it to make it more american airlines like such as implementing fuel policies or push back procedures etc...In that way we arent using the dispatchers we have the program in addition to fuel costs and fuel burn stats..If we do that. we would surely challenge other vas and create a new competitive network

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