Request for additional sanctioned flights

Jim, I waited to see if Mike D. would weigh in on this, as he is the one that always updated the regular hub schedules - if that's what you mean by sanctioned flights, (at least he did for the MSP hub he managed for many years).

If you'd like, I can email you an Excel spreadsheet with predefined fields as a template and you can put together a schedule by filling in the data fields. I can then easily add to the database the listing you create to be included in the official schedule.

John

All,

Well, I did see the original post, but since the request concerned city pairs that did not include KMSP, I assumed that this was not in my job jar and would be dealt with through the custom flight numbering option. I just now saw John's post (above). However, it's true that our Hub/Spoke schedule system generally excludes city pairs where neither is one of our hubs (KMSP, KMIA, or EGLL). That's a lot of city pairs.

When I built the current KMSP Hub Schedule (probably 10 years ago), the usual form was ABA, where A was KMSP. However, I did include a few of the form ABCBA and maybe a couple of the ABCDA form. I haven't added any additional flights to the KMSP schedule in a long time for several reasons. First of all, most of our pilots are at the top rank and could (and still can) assign their own flights. On top of that, most pilots seemed content to assign themselves flights from the existing schedule and not to need or want their hub manager to do that for them. Additionally, absent some particular motivation to pick a particular origin/destination pair, I didn't see any point in making the decision for the pilot..

That said, under different circumstances, I can envision such a motivation. An example exists in our Econ flights, where the prescription of a particular origin/destination pair is required to fix the parameters for the Econ calculation in order to provide a level playing field for the quasi - competitive aspect of these flights. However, the competitive aspect is effectively undercut by the fact that the gain/loss on a given flight is largely determined by the Category of the aircraft, and thus we have effectively four separate competitions with pilots jumping categories at will.

The only other case that comes to mind would be as an adjunct to a Training exercise in which the city pair, date, time of day, weather, radio navigation, etc. could be assigned to produce a particular training scenario. I have considered creating something like this, but I'm not sure our pilots would be interested. If I'm wrong about that, let me know.

Mike