The Flight planner screen is used to set up your staff roster, schedule flights, allocate customers and staff to the aircraft and manage the flight status and product delivery results to feed into your reporting. This article covers the following topics:


TABLE OF CONTENTS


Overview of the flight planner screen


Rostering staff

Staff need to be rostered on before you can allocate them to a flight or in the case of skydiving, be able to manifest your tandem customers. We recommend you start your flight plan by setting up your staff roster first. To begin rostering staff, click the person icon in the middle of the Flight Planner screen.

  1. The location is based on your device location. If All locations are showing it means your device isn’t allocated to one of the Manifest locations (this is configured in the Devices screen).
  2. Toggle the At work button to roster staff for the day. Blue indicates a staff member is at work.
  3. If you wish to roster a staff member from a different location, select All locations to find them and simply set them to “At work”. This will allocate the staff member to the same location the Flight planner screen is currently set to.


Adding a flight

To add a new flight, follow these steps:

  1. Click Add in the upper right corner of the Flight planner screen.

  2. Set your Aerodrome locations and takeoff time.

    • Takeoff/Time - where the aircraft will take off from and your planned takeoff time. Default time adds 30 mins to the current time, rounded up to the nearest 10 mins
    • Dropzone - For skydiving use, the location where customers will be dropped over and land
    • Landing/Time- where the aircraft lands. Leave the landing time blank as this will get filled out later.

  3. In the Flight section, select your Aircraft call sign from the list.

  4. Choose a Pilot (Pilot cert), and optionally a co-pilot (Co-pilot cert), from the list of rostered staff who have appropriate certifications.

  5. Enter the Fuel for the aircraft in pounds (lbs). This can be 0 when you first add the flight but must be updated to a value greater than 0 when the flight status is changed to on-call.

  6. Fill out the following additional fields if required, then click OK to add the flight.

    • Safety officer (DZSO cert)
    • Ground control (GCA cert)
    • Loadmaster (LM cert)
    • Notes (a preview will display in the Flight Planner screen if a note exists)



Manifest a flight

Follow these steps to manifest a flight:

  1. Customers who have completed the flight check-in process and are ready to be manifested will appear on the left-hand panel of the Flight planner screen showing the following details:

    • Product name (with colour-coding for easy distinction)
    • Booking number
    • Customer Name
    • Customer Weight
    • Notes, e.g. medical notes or internal notes
    • Certs required (for Skydiving) so you can tell what the customer has booked, e.g. photo & video or weight charges. Hover over the field to see the full cert list.

  2. To add a customer to a flight, click the blue arrow.

  3. If there are certs required, you will be prompted to select staff from a list of those available to work and have the correct certifications from the list.

  4. The customer will be allocated a seat as close to the front of the plane as possible. Click the seat number to drag customers to different seats. If the customer is allocated to a Tandem instructor for skydiving, then both seats are moved together.

  5. If you need to remove customers from a flight, click the blue arrow. If you wish to change a staff member, click on the staff members name.



Balancing the aircraft

After you have allocated all customers to the aircraft, you must ensure the load is balanced. A balanced load is indicated when the Centre of Gravity (CoG) area turns green. If the CoG display is red, move your seating plan arrangements to try to balance the aircraft (e.g. there could be to much weight at the front of the aircraft and passengers must be moved to the rear).


To view detailed information about the weight and balance calculations click on the CoG button, and choose either metric or imperial.



Update the status of a flight

Once all the passengers have been allocated a seat and the load is balanced, you are ready to update the flight status. Each change in status updates the colour of the status box.

Flight planner status colour

When you are ready to set the status to In progress, you will be prompted to check the flight information is correct and update the time. If you notice any information that is incorrect in the greyed out fields, click Cancel, then reset the status to Manifest, and amend the flight information in the left-hand panel on the Flight Planner screen. If the flight details are correct, you can update the Time as follows:

  • The takeoff time is set to your current computer time, but can be adjusted if required.
  • The landing time is set to 20 mins after the current time (this is a System setting and can be adjusted), and can be adjusted if needed.

When the aircraft has landed and you no longer need to display it on the manifest, you can set the flight status to Completed.


There are different edit functions available depending on the flight status shown:



Delivery results

 When you set the flight status to completed you will be asked to enter Delivery results. Delivery results record custom information about what happened on the flight. E.g.

  • If an entire flight of skydivers didn’t jump due to weather, you would record a delivery result of 'Did not Jump' (DNJ) for the entire flight.
  • If only some passengers could not complete their activity due to weather, you can manually set the delivery result per customer to DNJ in order to re-manifest the customer and record the DNJ against the staff member for the report
  • The rest of the statuses will vary per system as this is a custom list that can be configured. Select the status you need against the staff rows so it shows up in the report.



Re-manifest a customer

If you set the delivery result of a flight or customer to 'DNJ' (Did Not Jump) due to operational issues/weather, their manifest record will show back up in the Flight planner so you can re-manifest. Their original record will stay on the load. if required, you can reschedule the booking or split it out from the original booking if the other passengers on the booking did complete their jump/flight.