Sabre AirOps Suite

Sabre AirOps Suite

The Sabre® AirOps™ Suite provides SOC personnel of large airlines world wide with centralized, real-time access to critical data such as flight, passenger, crew, maintenance, aircraft, airport, weather, pay-load and navigational, as well as fuel data. The products in this suite help SOC personnel access data from a single point to make the best, unbiased decisions for an airline.

The AirOps suite includes these flight operations offerings:

Sabre® Decision Manager
Sabre® Dispatch Manager
Sabre® Ground Manager
Sabre® Load Manager
Sabre® Movement Manager
Sabre® Reaccommodation Manager

MOVEMENT CONTROL

Operations Monitoring and Scheduling

Sabre® Movement Manager enables an airline to monitor and schedule daily maintenance and flight operations. It uses a Gantt chart to graphically show flight leg information from a central database. The airline receives reliable, thorough information about current operations and maintenance events, which assists in evaluating problems and determining cost-effective solutions.

Movement Manager offers several additional modules:

The Maintenance Routing module uses optimization techniques to determine feasible aircraft routings over a prescribed decision horizon.
The Sabre ® EC Slots™ real-time slot request and management module oversees slot requests for Europe via the Central Flow Management Unit. The module manages CFMU-assigned slots by productively processing slot requests.
The browser-based Flight Information Display System provides real-time updates of the latest flight departure and arrival information in a continuous text display. This system is similar to a FIDS display at an airport, yet runs on a PC.

On average, carriers see an improvement of 7% to 10 % in on-time departures resulting in significant cost savings amounting to several million dollars using Movement Control. Euro-controlled carriers have found that by using the EC Slots module, they can improve on- time departures by up to 25%. This module enables an airline to track and manage its Euro-controlled airport slots, thereby reducing the opportunity for missed departure windows.

According to Gulf Air, Bahrain’s leading air carrier, the company has reduced costs by more than $17.3M over a three-year period and improved its on-time performance by 7% using Movement Manager. Gulf Air performed an internal analysis after the system was implemented that revealed the airline had saved more than $1M, primarily by improving on-time performance.

FLIGHT PLANNING

Sabre® Dispatch Manager is designed for all sizes of airlines world-wide. It enables a flight operations department to operate its own dispatching and flight planning system with little help. It interfaces with virtually all passenger reservations and message switching systems and provides the centralized functionality of mainframe dispatch systems in a flexible client/server setting. Carriers of any size can benefit, whether flight operations are scheduled or charter, jet or turboprop, international, domestic, regional or corporate.

One carrier analyzed the effect of Dispatch Manager on payload carriage on a single 747 long-haul route for 74 flights. The result: the system provided additional payload on 61 flights and reduced flight times by 1 to 24 minutes. Another study revealed a 1.7% reduction in fuel burn when the altitude was optimized and an 8.1% reduction when the route was optimized. An additional study showed payload increased 5% and dispatch staff utilization improved 33% over that of a manual system.

Air-to-Ground Messaging

Sabre® ACARS Manager is included as an optional capability of Dispatch Manager. It processes air-to-ground messaging between ACARS-equipped aircraft and designated positions within the air-line’s SOC. The system’s administrative functions enable flexible decoding, reformatting and distribution of a variety of operational data, reducing the clerical effort to process ACARS-generated mes sages, facilitating automatic proliferation of accurate data and minimizing redundant data entry.

LOAD PLANNING

Sabre® Load Manager is designed for all sizes of airlines worldwide. It helps load controllers produce optimal plans for loading aircraft and saving fuel. The system provides a consistent, accurate and straightforward means of performing required weight and balance tasks. At any time, a concise summary of an aircraft’s current weight, balance and limits can be displayed. A continuous visual flight weight and balance depiction provides a clear, ongoing portrait and real-time display of events. Load Manager also fully supports required IATA weight and balance documents and messages, and passenger check-in and flight planning system integration.

An international carrier currently using Load Manager comments on how well the system takes advantage of Windows capabilities and applications. In this airline’s opinion, the system is a powerful tool, a considerable advantage over other departure control systems. Load controllers can easily and efficiently deal with difficult flights, thus enabling the airline to maximize the utilization of available payload. The visual displays ensure that the airline users are at all times in control of the situation, ensuring customer satisfaction and future revenues.

CRITICAL DECISION SUPPORT

Sabre® Decision Manager is designed for all sizes of airlines world-wide. It uses an optimization-based algorithm to enable an airline to recover from irregular operations. The system delivers pre-planning for disruption events, optimized recovery solutions and fast solution times enabling multiple scenarios to be evaluation quickly. Decision Manager uses three models:

The Schedule Recovery model reschedules flights in the aftermath of an irregularity using input about the disrupted flight schedule, operational constraints and available aircraft data.
The Aircraft Recovery model produces revised aircraft rotations from practical solutions generated from original tail assignments and maintenance checks.
The Passenger Flow model determines the revenue impact of schedule changes on passenger flow through an airline’s network.

A recent study at a major technology university concluded that as much as $1.1M to $4.6M could be saved per year at an airline with an average of 1,500 flights per day with operational costs of $70 per minute by using a decision-support product like Decision Manager to improve on-time performance and minimize schedule disruptions.

GROUND MANAGEMENT

Sabre® Ground Manager is a tool to coordinate airport activities with operations and provide the operations controllers with an electronic view of the latest activities on the ground. It provides graphical monitoring of detailed and accurate flight departure/arrival activities along with gate and maintenance operations. It communicates real-time information on flight arrival/departure activities, thereby improving on-time departures. The tool also delivers an interface between the SOC and airports and handles tasks such as aircraft cleaning, baggage handling, catering, cargo, and other activities.

Airlines utilizing the Ground Manager are able to:

Minimize delays during irregular operations.
Improve airline operations by managing flights on a real-time basis.
Reduce costs by enabling complete integrated operations control management.
Protect alliance revenue by linking partner flight schedules.

PASSENGER REACCOMMODATION

Sabre® Reaccommodation Manager is designed for all sizes of air-lines worldwide. It provides a way to optimally reaccommodate passengers that have been displaced due to flight cancellations. To accomplish this, the system values each passenger according to use-defined criteria (frequent flyer, fare paid, class of travel and so on), prioritizing the passenger list based on calculated values to create alternative itineraries. Next, passengers are notified and receive a rebooking via an improved, automated alerting process.

Reaccommodation Manager simplifies the process of moving misplaced passengers and minimizes schedule changes, resulting in improved customer service. Airlines benefit with:

Optimized reaccommodation of passengers based on user-defined rules.
Increased customer loyalty by taking care of the most important customers.
Reduced cost by automating reaccommodation process.

All product literature is provided in .pdf format. Adobe Reader is required to view this material.