Clients Can See "Each And Every Trip"

Air Routing International has unveiled several enhancements to its Flight Manager online program.

"Adding technological capabilities to our Flight Manager program has helped set us apart from our competition," said Tim Maystrik, vice president of Air Routing International.  "The program allows our clients to look into each and every trip that we handle for them. We are really acting as an extension of their flight department with this tool."

Flight Manager allows corporate flight department personnel to enter trip data for coordination by Air Routing operations staff. Pilots, dispatchers and schedulers can then check the status of permits, fuel and ground service arrangements, flight plans, hotel and ground transportation, security, and weather, among other things, via the Internet.

Flight Manager, working through a format of personalized Web pages enables users to follow a flight online, create briefings for passengers and crew, examine essential airport data and view weather, current and forecast, in several formats.

Air Routing has enhanced the viewing of the arrival and departure times for each leg of a trip in the Calendar View section by adding three separate options. The first is to view the trip in UTC Time, second is Local Airport Time and the third is Home Base Time.

"This is a terrific tool," said Robert Cormack, Air Routing’s manager business application development. "Now we have a very standardized tool that you can view all the trips from any location in the world."

Air Routing has also enhanced Flight Manager’s Airport Information section for any leg of a trip. By clicking on the airport code you obtain basic airport information such as airport coordinates, runway information, frequency information.

"This is especially appealing for pilots," said Cormack. "By clicking on one tab they can locate an airport and view the leg they are flying on in a great circle distance. A second tab features a weather map that gives the last satellite composite imagery of that location. A third tab is devoted to alternate airports within 50 nautical miles of the scheduled airport. You have links to any one of those airports."

Another feature that has been added to Flight Manager is called Trip Daily View which is an hour by hour listing of all departures and arrivals for a specific day.  In addition, an option is being added whereby the names of crew and passengers may be added to a client’s trip folder for each leg of the trip. Each crew member and passenger has pertinent information such as how they may be quickly located and contacted.

"What we are doing is not only showing the departure and arrival information for each flight but next to that information we are adding actual crew names and/or passenger names," said Cormack. "This is an important feature. For example, if a dispatcher has to immediately get in contact with specific captain or passenger because of possibly a security threat. If it is 3:00 in the morning the dispatcher may not have immediate access to the captain or passenger. He now can log into the website, find the trip, pick the specific leg, find the individual person, view his profile, find his telephone number and call. Otherwise the dispatcher would have had to drive all the way back to office and open appropriate software to find that information."

Flight Manager enables only authorized users can access profile information with each client controlling the security level and determining who may or may not view the information.

Another enhancement to Flight Manager is a new "Today’s Weather" section that will show the current weather for all global airports where travelers will be arriving or departing from. The section will package all the departures and arrivals for a day and place them in one viewing site that enables the traveler to see what is happening in real time at those airports.

In addition, a new My Profile section enables each individual who is listed in that section an opportunity to edit their own profile.

Further enhancements have been made to Flight Manager’s Database Updates section with the addition of three options. The first is a "person info" section with two options covering crew and passengers.

"The crew option is particularly important for dispatchers because they need to know virtually everything about that crew," said Cormack. "They may need phone numbers, addresses, information about documents. All this is now in one location."

The second option is a company profile which discloses information about the company’s dispatching home base airport while the third option is aircraft information where all the aircraft under that corporate account is listed.

Maystrik said Air Routing with these additions to Flight Manager is getting more and more customers to depend on the program. "It is really making communications with our clients very efficient because clients can see what we are doing on their behalf.  When they ask the questions and get on the phone with us or email us, we both are on the same page.  That makes for a very warm close relationship with the flight operator."

FMI: www.airrouting.com