A New Era for Crew Recovery at Continental Airlines

A New Era for Crew Recovery at Continental Airlines:

All airlines face problems in their services on a daily basis. This can be due to various reasons such as unexpected events, mechanical/technical problems, weather, and even crew unavailability. Due to these disruptions flights can be delayed or even cancelled in some situations. In this way, not only the current flights are disrupted but also any other scheduled flights the crew members might have. When this happens, the airlines have to reassign their crews quickly to cover any other open flight in order for them to return to their original schedules in a cost effective manner. They have to obey all government regulations, contractual obligations, and quality-of-life-requirements while doing this. All this was too much for Continental Airlines. Therefore, CALEB Technologies developed the “CrewSolver decision-support system for Continental Airlines. They tried to generate globally optimal, or near optimal, crew recovery solutions. Since its enactment, this system has been a success. It has even dealt with several high profile events such as the December 2000 and March 2001 Nor’easter snowstorms, the June 2001 Houston flood, and of course the September 11th terrorist attacks. In all of these cases, the Airline recovered very quickly, and also acquired benefits that were worth millions of dollars. An estimate showed that Continental saved approximately $40 million in 2001 for major disruptions only.

Continental has many hubs in the New York Metropolitan area at Newark International Airport, in Houston, Texas at George Bush Intercontinental Airport and in Cleveland, Ohio at Hopkins International Airport. The advantage of the hub system is that it provides the passenger with services between large numbers of destinations more frequently than it would by servicing each route directly. Each of these hubs are located in a very busy area with lots of business and population. In this way it ensures a high volume of...