Consider Managerial Practice 10.1 and the manner in which Air New Zealand schedules its flight crews. Relate each step in the process to the levels in the operations planning and scheduling process shown in Figure 10.2.
Practice 10.1
Scheduling at Air New Zealand
How important is scheduling to an airline company? Certainly, customer satisfaction regarding on-time schedule performance is critical in a highly competitive industry such as air transportation. In addition, airlines lose a lot of money when expensive equipment, such as an aircraft, is idle. Flight and crew scheduling, however, is a complex process. For example, Air New Zealand is a group of five airlines with a combined fleet of 105 aircraft, with another 21 more on order. The average utilization is 8:28 hours per day. It has undergone an $800 million upgrade to its long-haul service, refitting its Boeing 747 fleet and adding eight new Boeing 777-200 aircraft for flights to North America. It directly serves 50 ports—26 domestic and 24 international within 15 countries. It carries 13.4 million passengers annually, and its network incorporates flight times ranging from 15 minutes to 13 hours.
Operations planning and scheduling at the aggregate level begins with a market plan that identifies the new and existing flight segments that are needed to remain competitive. This general plan is further refined to a threeyear plan and then is put into an annual budget in which flight segments have specific departure and arrival times. Twenty-six weeks prior to the day of operation, the timetable for all the flights Air New Zealand will fly is created. This is followed by the assignment of aircraft types to flights and the development of aircraft routes. Six weeks prior to the day of operation schedulers determine sequences of flights that can be flown in a feasible way at minimum cost. The two types of crews—pilots and attendants—each come with its own set of constraints. Pilots, for example, cannot be scheduled for
more than 35 hours in a 7-day week and no more than 100 hours in a 28-day cycle. They also must have a 36-hour break every 7 days and 30 days off in an 84-day cycle. Each pilot’s tour of duty begins and ends at a crew base and consists of an alternating sequence of duty periods and rest periods, with duty periods including one or more flights. Finally, four weeks prior to the day of operation, actual rosters for an individual crew member are developed. The scheduler must ensure that each flight has a qualified crew and that each crew member has a feasible tour of duty over the roster period. From the crew’s point of view, it is also important to satisfy as many crew requests and preferences as possible.
