Widebody; Low Wing; 2 Turbojet Eng
Dispatch Dispatcher
Time Pressure; Workload; Situational Awareness
Deviation / Discrepancy - Procedural Published Material / Policy
Equipment / Tooling; Company Policy
The VHHH flights all had issues today which caused extreme task saturation.I listed flight X flight planning as main problem but I need to detail other two flights so the full breath of issue can be understood of task saturation and desk workload.The aircraft being used to fly flight Y arrived late and when fueling for the outbound flight the aircraft encountered a crew legality issues in addition to a mechanical issue; there was lengthy discussions on crew legality; working the mechanical issue; en-route weather for turbulence; volcanic ash; in addition to the flight plan.  There was confusion on sign in times for flight attendants as well as [duty times] for flight deck; and with the additional maintenance problem delaying that flight caused additional problems.  The length of these problems drove the PIC to call Dispatch and request assistance from Crew Scheduling for clarification while he worked with Maintenance on fuel issue; the aircraft was not receiving fuel; and in one of the many briefing with that captain on the weather and other hazards we decided since the fuel was not uploaded as of yet we would add additional fuel and I as dispatcher would get accurate; timely ride reports over the sigmet area.Flight Z was airborne and [a] volcano in Aleutian islands decided to go off; this required all other issues to be tabled while a new route could be built and verified we have fuel to re route without stopping- all other crews understand this but it does not stop the other groups from calling and interrupting trying to get info about the delay on flight Y and later the issues with flight planning flight X.Flight X had flight planning issues again: this is a re occurring problem and should have been given the resources to get an expedited fix.  Currently the dispatcher is tasked to use various 'work-Arounds' to get a flight plan to calculate.  This is UNACCEPTABLE; to have the main program of which we have known issues of calculating with accurate information and provide a work around to make it run but yet still produce a product that is known defective.  The dispatchers are then having to work even harder to get a flight plan to run and hope that we have good information on fuel burns for the work around.  Furthermore; these work arounds are more task intensive on an already task saturated desk; now the work around is a multi part multi faceted approach to get a flight plan to just run.This occurred due to lack of urgency to fix a known problem; and the temporary work arounds to problem has caused additional and further problems to the flight planning system taking even more time away from other duties.Now with a know problem and work arounds that take even longer to fix no adjustment has been made to workload; if you cannot fix problem fix the workload.Fix the flight planning problem or adjust the workload to mitigate problem; until a improved flight plan system is available.
Air carrier Dispatcher reported being task saturated by multiple distractions while flight planning multiple long range ETOPS flights to include a work around required when generating flight plans in order for the flight plans to generate correctly.