Medium Large Transport
Dispatch Dispatcher
Situational Awareness; Workload
Deviation / Discrepancy - Procedural FAR; Deviation / Discrepancy - Procedural Published Material / Policy; Inflight Event / Encounter Weather / Turbulence
Flight Crew Became Reoriented
Company Policy
Flight was allowed to enter a tornado watch area without dispatcher notifying in a timely manner. It wasn't until almost through the area when I realized they hadn't been notified of hazardous weather. This flight and 16 other flights were passed to me as part of the normal pass down. After the pass down I had turned my attention to completing the 6 or 8 releases still pending. I now had over 20 flight airborne throughout the entire U.S.; Canada and Mexico; weather was marginal throughout the Mississippi/Ohio valleys with convective tornado activity throughout. I had 14 pending departures during this time as well. Several flight had landed without me being able to see and analyze them as required in flight following responsibilities. 40 minutes after being handed this pass down I needed to begin the pass down process myself only this time I had to pass it to a dispatcher with less than 2 months experience who was still under training supervision. I feel that the 20 flights if not for the trainer would have been too overwhelming for a new employee. It was during this pass down of my flights that I realized I had lost situational awareness of several alternates due to weather developing faster than anticipated. The passdown dispatcher excepted this and I assume made the appropriate changes. This scenario plays out almost daily in dispatch and is in no way acceptable to me; I will be trying much harder at the end of my shift to improve; however this will never be enough to handle this total task saturation in the last hour of a difficult shift.Management's total lack of understanding of task saturation and organizational ability to develop a plan to alleviate this scenario. This was a policy change a few months ago to fix a problem; unfortunately it created more than it fixed.I will do the best I can to reorganize my priorities at the end of my shift and deal with this saturation.
Air carrier Dispatcher reported his workload was so high he allowed a flight under his supervision to enter a tornado watch area without notification.