Crew management—constructing, maintaining, and operating crew rosters, and deciding who is doing what at each point in time—is a challenging balancing act. The flight schedule is constantly changing, with delays, crew absences, technical problems, and an overwhelming number of rules and other factors to consider. These factors include managing crew fatigue risk and fulfilling promises to the crew regarding their requests and bids.
The daily tasks described above are just the beginning. An additional, critical task that can significantly impact both the airline's competitiveness and the crew's psycho-social wellbeing is the validation or discarding of new ideas for improving the crew management process. This involves investigating options such as opening or closing crew bases, modifying agreements or scheduling practices, improving standby assignments, or changing how cabin crew are cross-qualified. Without realistic planning and quantifiable results, intuition alone can often be misleading regarding the effects of such changes on the airline.
Strategic analysis and building "what-if" scenarios to examine various options often far outweigh the monthly benefits gained from optimization tools. The key is to identify and pursue good ideas while avoiding poor ones. While opinions can be interesting, focusing on facts produced with the help of optimisers is what truly matters.
Please read more about how RAVE and optimization supports fact-based decision making in this document - called Your Opinion is Interesting, but optimization matters.
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