Consolidating Columbus Operations and Looking for new Frontiers

Kurzfassung

In January 2014, the Columbus Flight Control Team (FCT) started with a modified real-time operations scenario. Since then the 24/7 shift coverage was reduced to the Col-Flight Director and the STRATOS position. The whole year of 2014, and also partly 2015, was needed to consolidate the new set-up, with its new and profound constraints, to find workarounds for special operational cases, to finalize operational product adaptations, but also to reduce the workload of the Columbus Flight Control team taking into account the reduced resources. Nonetheless, it is clear that the Col-FCT is at the limit of their capabilities, especially during high activity phases. The consolidation phase was necessary due to the short preparation and implementation phase in late 2013 and early 2014. In parallel, the Columbus Execute Level Planning team was merged with the Operations Coordinator team.