La dificultad del CEO
Tuesday, 1. December 2009, 08:27:46
I remember a night, when working at SEAT, and while I was attending an incoming flight, a supervisor of mine showed me a magazine that pax left... this is the cover of the magazine, in english it says something like "The difficulty of CEO"...I know that magazine refered to Chief Executive Officer, but here, in aviation and in Spanish, CEO refers also to another figure: El Centro Estratégico Operacional ( Operational Strategical Centre )
I remember when I was at SEAT, we used to blame CEO because of the bad planning of flight ( and with this: delays in ETD (Estimated Time of Departure) and when my supervisor showed me that cover I took the picture in order to reprint it and post it as a kind of local joke...
... if someone had told me that two months after I took this pic I'd be hired by Mexicana de Aviación for working at CEO i wouldn't believe that...
Today I was chatting with my friend Barbara and I was showing her some pics of my office when I realized I haven't posted anything about my new job.
CEO is divided, among other departments, into:- Flight Planning (where dispatchers plans the route of every flight around the country and internationally)
- Crew Assignment (in which it is assigned every pilot, copilot and flight assistants for every flight, including the personnel in reserve)
- Equipment Assignment (along with crew, every flight is assigned with an airplane according to the necessities of the operation... an Airbus 318 if there is less than 100 Passengers pre-booked for that flight.... an Airbus 320 with powerful CFM Engines if there are more than 140 passengers booked and lots of cargo (like 3 or 4 tons) for that operation)
- Flight Watching (every flight is followed in a chart in order to check and change itineraries if there's a delay in any flight of the day)
- Weight and Balance... this is where I am...
What do we do in weight and balance? ok... let me put this into an image I've considered as the best for explaining:
Imagine an airplane as a huge seesaw... with the wings as rotation center; every weight into the airplane: Crew, Food, Passengers, Potable Water, Fuel, Baggages, Mail, Cargo, everything that may go inside the plane must be located in different positions in order to assure the Gravity Center is not misplaced outside the area of the wings, so you must balance all that weight in order to avoid the plane flies with all the weight on the nose area or on the tail are... but as balanced as possible... 
... that's my job: using a software named Amadeus I have to create a Load Information Report in which it's reported to personnel in ground how many pieces of baggage or cargo are required in every bin. The difficult resides in: in the very moment I'm attending a flight with route LAP-LMM (La Paz, Baja California - Los Mochis, Sinaloa) via Movistar cellphone, I'm attending via Amadeus Messenger to the personnel from the flight LGW - MEX (London Gatwick Aiport - Mexico Intl. Airport) and via Nextel a flight ORD - GDL (Chicago O'Hare Intl. Airport - Guadalajara ) and all of them are requesting information of their own flights at the same time... it's some times very stressing. Even though i really miss being at the ramp... I like my job, it's very interesting and... there's another via to practice my english skills while I'm dispatching flights from Canada and United States...
I'll be telling you more of this next post... because in this moment im falling asleep.
) ... my Workers Group and me suffered from the 1 and a half hours of constant rain... 
WIDGETIZE