Sabre Airline Solutions

Sabre Rocade Suite

Movement Control | Flight Planning | Load Planning | Critical Decision Support | Passenger Reaccommodation

The Sabre® Rocade® Airline Operations Suite offers a tightly integrated group of products with comprehensive solutions for operations control, crew management, and flight scheduling for medium-sized airlines in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and Asia Pacific.

The Rocade suite includes the Sabre® Rocade® Operations Control System. See the Crew Management and Planning and Scheduling sections for information about the Rocade products for those areas.

The following flight operations products complement the Rocade suite:

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

Through improved processes, access to information and automation, airlines using the Rocade systems have reduced planning and scheduling costs up to 7% for pilot workforce and up to 13% for cabin crew.

The Sabre Airline Solutions products that improve an airline’s day of operations are described in this section.

MOVEMENT CONTROL

Operations Control

The Sabre® Rocade® Operations Control System, designed primarily for small to medium-sized carriers of up to 100 aircraft, improves aircraft productivity on the day of operation. The system displays fleet status and handles movement and load information through automatic feeds from external message sources. It shows delays, aircraft changes, departures, arrivals and expected delays. In addition, users can send messages using standard format templates for many types of message. Tightly integrated with the Operations Control System is a decision-support tool to provide suggested solutions to given problems. The system is aimed primarily for carriers in the European, Middle East, African, and Asian regions.

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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