Commercial Fixed Wing
Time Pressure; Communication Breakdown; Training / Qualification
Deviation / Discrepancy - Procedural Published Material / Policy
General None Reported / Taken
Company Policy
The dispatch workload even with a new desk open on the Europe and Asia section is still too high. Additionally; both the desk layout and the lack of consistent experience in working each area of the operation are hazards to a safe operation. On one day; in addition to my flight there were 15 other flights both in the air and to be planned spread out been Asia flying and Hawaii flying. The Hawaii flying needs in my opinion to be a separate desk. One aircraft had a left engine generator that failed and this necessitated their been fuel flow and APU burn penalties to be applied. Tech was conferred and they concurred with the penalties being applied by myself and the crew. Tech advised that if the captain was not comfortable with the fuel numbers I had sent to him via ACARS with the fuel penalties applied that NRT would be the best place to land where we could have company maintenance work the plane. NRT from an operations standpoint has both passenger handling and fueling capability that is superior to other airports in Asia and Alaska. When the captain decided he was not comfortable with the arrival fuel due to the inoperative generator fuel burn penalties; we agreed on changing the destination to NRT in order to re-fuel and placard the inoperative item on the ground. I was training a new hire who was working the desk while I monitored. The trainee is brand new to Asia dispatching and it was his first day working the desk so I needed to step in and do a lot of the legwork for him while at the same time teaching him how to handle certain things that he needed to know. In essence due to the workload caused by the diversion; we worked as a team and had assistance from the dispatcher next to us. With the current work set up; he was the only qualified dispatcher in the same quad that could provide help. The closest quad of qualified Asia dispatchers working the Europe desks is far enough away to not even know what is going on to provide any help. They cannot even answer our phone lines. I had four to coordinate things on this diversion not only with the crew and give him the numbers and info he needed but I also needed to inform and brief management; tech; crew tracking; equipment coordinators and also NRT operations. All this is time consuming with or without a trainee and desk mate to assist. I need time to decide how to handle the problem to make sure the diversion goes a smoothly as an irregular operation can go. There are numerous variables involved. At the same time all this is happening; my trainee received a call from a pilot saying he was refusing to fly due to his inexperience at flying to HNL. My trainee had assumed that I heard the conversion since we were right next to each other at the time but I was working on the flight plan for the flight heading to NRT and did not hear the conversation. The first I knew of it was when I received a call from the captain on the return flight from Hawaii asking about why his flight had not been delayed out given the late arrival of the inbound. Now I am trying to coordinate a diversion; a late flight with crew duty issues on the return leg due to this captains refusal in LAX; I have the other flights in the air that admittedly neither I nor the trainee were adequately watching; and I also had a flight that was being worked on and was awaiting information from maintenance to determine if and when that one would depart. Three major issues on one desk is too much with the amount of leg work involved in these flights. Domestically; there are dozens of airports that can handle an issue and the flights are in general much shorter segments. When you are over the ocean or over a remote area; you can't easily land in any city especially when it is not an emergency situation. These flights are so challenging when things go wrong that one flight can easily cost you 8 hours of work. The workload I had was unmanageable. In addition to this; there is a huge issue with using junior people for both domestic and international desks. Europe and Asia really needs to be separate qualifications for everyone but especially for vacation relief dispatchers. You might go anywhere from 4-12 months without working certain desks. There are big differences between Asia and Europe east and westbounds as well as the Hawaii flying. If you don't regularly work the desks and all of a sudden need to work it; it is like being in training again. If you don't use your knowledge and experience; you lose it. There are too many big items in these desks to have so many inexperienced dispatchers who only work these desks on a part-time; as needed; basis. There are some days especially on the midnights where there aren't any experienced line holding dispatchers on the Euro/Asia side whereas the desks can all be manned by dispatchers who have only a few years of overall dispatch experience with a small part time portion of it being on one of these desks. You need this qualification to be one where people who have it then need to use it regularly or are always paired with an experienced line holder to guide them through issues that they may rarely if ever see. There are rules against pairing inexperienced pilots together and also currency requirements for pilots that require recency of experience. It should be the same for dispatchers. A dispatcher who has not worked an Asia or a Europe desk in more than two months should lose the qualification until he gets recency under the supervision of an experienced dispatcher. You lose a lot of knowledge from simply not being recent on the desks. The Hawaii flights need to be on a separate desk dedicated at all times to Hawaii. Desks that operate to Asia should not at any time have Hawaii flights.
Dispatcher who was conducting training had one flight experience a maintenance issue; another aircraft diverted and he missed a call (received by the trainee) concerning a pilot reporting unable to take a flight due to a qualification issue. A substitute pilot was assigned and the flight took off late as a result of the miscommunication.