Flight number

Abstract: Airline schedules are based on the carefully-planned use of resources, airports, planes, crews, etc., to provide passengers with on-time arrivals. When airport capacity is reduced below demand, the...

Abstract: Given the flight schedule of an airline, the fleet assignment problem consists of determining the aircraft type to assign to each flight leg in order to maximize the total expected profits while satisfying aircraft routing and availability constraints. The profit for a leg is a function of the leg’s stochastic passenger demand, the capacity of the aircraft assigned to the leg, and the aircraft operational costs. This paper considers the weekly fleet assignment problem in the case where homogeneity of aircraft type is sought over legs sharing the same flight number. Homogeneity allows, among other things, easier ground service planning. An exact mixed-integer linear programming model, as well as a heuristic solution approach based on mathematical programming, are presented. Computational results obtained on Air Canada instances involving up to 4400 flight legs are reported. The system produces realistic solutions arising from a trade-off between profits and homogeneity, and solves large-scale instances in short times with very small optimality gaps.

Abstract: “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard Sterling Airline's Flight Number 743, bound for Edinburgh. This is your captain speaking. Our flight time will be two hours, and I am pleased to report both that you have a 97% chance of reaching your destination without being significantly injured during the flight and that our chances of making a serious error during the flight, whether you are injured or not, is only 6.7%. Please fasten your seatbelts, and enjoy the flight. The weather in Edinburgh is sunny.” Would you stay aboard? We doubt it. Luckily, the safety statistics in airline travel are far, far better than these figures. Between 1990 and 1994 United States airline fatalities were 0.27 per 1 000 000 aircraft departures, less than one third the rate in mid-century, despite vast increases in the complexity and volume of our aviation systems. One estimate is that a modern passenger would have to fly continuously for 20 000 years in order to reach a 50% chance of injury in an airplane accident. In health care it is a totally different story. With the rising complexity and reach of modern medicine have come startling …

Abstract: A system for monitoring the operation of an aircraft, especially a helicopter, which automatically provides information which relates to the operation of the aircraft. Data acquisition and processing units centralize data relating to the aircraft together and group them in information pages. At least one information page contains a flight report of at least the latest flight of the aircraft, which simultaneously provides a flight number, flight duration, number of cycles of the engines, number of cycles of the turbine, and any appropriate message regarding detected faults and/or whether any of the aircraft's limitations have been exceeded. A display unit displays the information within the view of at least one pilot of the aircraft. At the end of a flight, a selection unit automatically selects a flight report which is automatically displayed by the display.