Sabre Flight Control Suite

A successful airline excels at System Operations Control center management. This area enables the airline to operate competitive schedules that meet passenger demand while meeting dispatch requirements and overcoming disruptions to schedules. Another major challenge includes loading the aircraft in the most effective manner to maximize revenue and ensure on-time performance. Sabre Airline Solutions offers three suites of integrated products to help address issues such as weight and balance, air traffic, weather, ground handling, passenger reaccommodation and government regulations.

Sabre® Flight Control Suite customers can access training information online. Please contact your account manager for a login and password.

The Sabre® Flight Control Suite offers flight operations products tailored particularly for the structure of start-up, small, medium-sized, regional, and low-cost airlines in the United States and Latin America. This segment of airlines typically has smaller fleets needing simpler solutions, short time-to-market applications and intuitive interfaces for easy training. Whether an airline flies one aircraft or 100, the Flight Control crew and flight operations pro-ducts are right-sized for its SOC. Often referred to as an “airline in a box,” the Flight Control products are the only systems this category of airlines in the specified locations may need to fully automate its SOC function and manage crew assignments. This group of afford-able products is scalable and easily implemented.

The Flight Control suite includes the Sabre® FliteTrac™ system. See the Crew Management section for information about the Flight Control products for those areas.

The following flight operations products can be seamlessly integrated into the Flight Control suite:

Sabre® Decision Manager
Sabre® Dispatch Manager
Sabre® Load Manager
Sabre® Reaccommodation Manager

RESOURCE MANAGEMENT

Assignment Scheduling and Tracking

The Sabre® CrewTrac® system is specifically designed for airlines with smaller fleets needing simpler solutions, short time-to-market applications and intuitive interfaces for easy training The CrewTrac system is a real-time application for tracking crew assignments, ensuring legal requirements are met, validating flight coverage and performing crew qualification checks. Using this economical “management by exception” system, crew schedulers can monitor the up-to-the-minute legality status of every crewmember and anticipate crew problems caused by irregular operations. Graphical displays enable quick monitoring of crew resources. When this system is used with the Sabre® CrewQual system, crewmembers are confirmed as legal and qualified for their assignments. Options provide crewmembers with remote access to pertinent information, such as check-in and current assignments, via our voice response application.

Airlines using the CrewTrac system find they can increase their crew utilization and minimize schedule delays or flight cancellations caused by a lack of qualified crewmembers.

ROSTER OR SCHEDULE GENERATION

Crew Planning

The Sabre® CrewPlan® system is specifically designed for airlines with smaller fleets needing simpler solutions, short time-to-market applications and intuitive interfaces for easy training. The CrewPlan system answers the issues raised when an airline must continually change schedules. The system’s optimization suite and breadth of functionality give crew resource planners the tools to efficiently pro-pose workable solutions. The CrewPlan system uses optimization modules to generate pairing solutions, develop monthly crew schedules via bidlines or preferential bidding and provide a wealth of statistics and reports for analysis and information sharing.

Airlines that thought they could never afford optimization tools have found that the CrewPlan system more than pays for itself. With fleets as small as five aircraft or as large as 100, airlines use this tool to increase crewmember utilization. The system also shows how to accomplish the same amount of flying with fewer crewmembers per day. This can provide quantifiable savings through lower crewmember staffing or more time off for crews, also resulting in lower absenteeism rates.

TRAINING

Qualifications Management

The Sabre® CrewQual® system is specifically designed for airlines with smaller fleets needing simpler solutions, short time-to-market applications and intuitive interfaces for easy training The CrewQual system helps satisfy the governmental requirements for maintaining the training records of airline pilots, check airmen, flight instructors, flight attendants and dispatchers. The system maintains records of all applicable training, medical certificates and licenses required by crewmembers or flight dispatchers to perform their current duties. It also projects and reports upcoming training requirements to avoid untimely expiration of current qualifications and can define training requirements for promotions or upgrades to current qualifications.

The automated record keeping functions of the CrewQual system can result in reduced labor costs and considerable savings in paper. More than 40 carriers use this system to manage their pilot and flight attendant qualifications and training records, determining the due date for each type of training required to maintain qualifications or to transition or upgrade to new qualifications.

Training Scheduling and Management

The Sabre® CrewClass® system helps an airline consolidate and manage all information about training scheduling into a single data-base. When used in conjunction with the Sabre CrewTrac and Sabre CrewQual systems, the CrewClass system provides an integrated solution for managing training scheduling. The system specializes in initial and recurrent training requirements for crew and manages planned absences for students and instructor pilots. It offers a wide variety of tools to manage data, such as notifications for students and instructors, printed schedules, training event swapping, rescheduling when disruptions occur to training schedules and on-screen alerts for student or instructor shortages.

With the CrewClass system, an airline can define training segments, modules and curricula, create classes of students, build and print class schedules, assign instructors and check airmen, send notifications and alerts, maximize utilization of training assets and minimize elapsed time to complete required training. The CrewClass system can reduce training costs considerably when pilot training absences are incorporated into the staffing model.

MOVEMENT CONTROL

Operations Control and Flight Following

The Sabre® FliteTrac™ system is an operations control and flight-following application designed for U.S. and Latin American airlines with smaller fleets needing simpler solutions. It enables SOC personnel to readily monitor the status of the airline’s flights. By interfacing with an airline’s CRS, the FliteTrac system can display real-time flight information in a Gantt chart format with user-defined colors indicating flight status. The system interfaces with an airline’s CRS to process flight movement messages, gathering data such as flight number and date, origin and destination, departure time, assigned aircraft, fuel data, passenger list (both planned and actual) and the original, revised, estimated and actual arrival time.

A major carrier utilizing the FliteTrac system reports that the messaging capabilities of the system are invaluable. The carrier states, “A simple mouse click immediately informs all parties. Before the FliteTrac system, the process was manual and could take in excess of an hour to ensure that everyone was notified. With the FliteTrac system processing all the time information, the accuracy and consistency of the information we are able to provide to our customers is greatly improved. ETA information is also much more timely and accurate.”

The FliteTrac system offers these modules:

Internet Communication
The Sabre® FliteTrac™ Web module offers remote access over the Internet to the FliteTrac system information. Airport operations can display operational information in a format tailored for station personnel. Unlike traditional methods, this information is real-time.

Voice Communication
Sabre® FliteTrac™ Voice provides the ability to access limited flight information, such as arrival and departure times (both scheduled and actual) from a touch-tone phone. FliteTrac Voice is popular with charter operators with dynamic schedules that aren’t available through a major CRS.

Maintenance Control
The Sabre® MxControl™ maintenance scheduling system works with the FliteTrac system to monitor an airline’s planned short-term (three to ten days) aircraft routing and maintenance scheduling. The system monitors planned aircraft maintenance activities and communicates that information to an airline’s SOC center via messages and graphical screen displays. The system uses color coding to designate deferred items and inspections that are close to expiring for servicing.

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.

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.

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