MaSSSoftech

Here's Vicki King, with 42 years of experience at American, with the manual system in front of her as she manages the traffic today at Terminal A at D/FW. She talks with the pilots of the planes and guides them into the terminal and keeps things humming. To find potential conflicts, she must coordinate with other staffers and other systems at American to see potential gate conflicts and to get a better understanding of what delays on a certain flight might mean for the airline's overall operations.

The new gear will give her incredible amounts of data at her fingertips. For a flight that might be slightly delayed or heavily delayed, King will be able to find out exactly how overdue the plane is, how many Executive Platinum passengers are on the flight, how many people are going to connect on that flight and where their connections are in relation to where the plane is set to arrive at the airport. She can find the best possible gate and try to set up a swap for another gate, and also alert baggage handlers to get bags that are in danger of not connecting.

The level of data here available to King is going to be off the charts in comparison to how she had to use less-intuitive systems before to find out information about flights. Ford notes that American's computers in its System Operation Control center could talk with other systems managing flight operations, but not very seamlessly, and the airline's "back end" (the functions that passengers really don't see) is the focus of its upgrade efforts that have cost it millions of dollars.

The goal is to give employees the very best information about flight status and give its operations staff real-time data to help them make tough decisions like which of 10 flights have to get canceled because of bad weather. The system will show which flight will cause the least disruption, and now that data will be available not just to Systems Control staff but to people in the tower and all around the airline.

That's because Ford and his staff have built a "Look Ahead" buffer for American's computer systems that all these new applications can tap into and find common data -- before these systems could talk with each other but may not have been able to find the same data about passengers or flight status or where luggage might have been.

The Vantage Point is just one of a series of new applications that American is rolling out for employees on the operations side to help push the best information about flight status to their employees. American's improvements related to flight status update alerts sent to passenger mobile devices presented situations where gate changes or flight cancellations got to fliers faster than American employees who were forced to rely on slower systems for updates.

Ford says along with CRM -- customer relationship management -- the new gear will help ERM -- employee relationship management -- to give American employees the best real-time data about flights. American is piloting a program in Boston to let gate agents tell passengers exactly what their options are during difficult weather, a technology that's coming to D/FW fairly soon.

Back in the tower, King says she helped design the look and feel of the Vantage system (built from scratch by American's information technology crews) and her only regret is that she'll have but a year to play with it as she plans to retire next year. "It's going to mean a lot less work for me," she said -- but will free her up to make critical decisions about how to smooth ground operations during thunderstorms and what the airline business likes to call "irregular operations" - the kind where folks get stuck in airports.

And if for whatever reason the new system goes down, the "pucks" will always be there as a backup.