11 members · 6 posts · Dispatch
Dispatchers, ops controllers, and the crews who talk to them. Release planning, fuel calls, reroutes, and the standing argument about who actually has operational control.
Crews are welcome and encouraged. Bring the question you were too busy to ask on the phone.
Mei-Lin Chao (pinned)
This group is for both sides of the phone call. Dispatchers, bring the thing crews keep doing that costs you twenty minutes. Crews, bring the thing on the release you have never understood and were embarrassed to ask about. Nobody gets mocked here.
Mei-Lin Chao
Getting into dispatch, the whole path in one post. Certificate school, five to seven weeks, two to seven thousand dollars depending on where. Then a regional or a cargo operator, usually nights, usually low pay for eighteen months. Then it opens up fast. No medical, no flight time, no degree required.
Harriet Nakano
Flight service specialist, twelve years, which is the branch of this trade everyone forgets exists. We are not dispatch and we do not release anything. We brief, we take PIREPs, and we run search and rescue when somebody does not close a flight plan. That last one is why we still answer the phone.
Marcus Webb
Taking the invitation. What actually happens on your end between me saying I want an extra 800 pounds and it showing up? I have genuinely never known and I have been doing this seven years.
Mei-Lin Chao
Operational control, said once, plainly. Under 121 the dispatcher and the captain share it. That means I cannot make you go and you cannot make me release it. If either of us is uncomfortable, the airplane stays. This is not a technicality, it is the entire design.
Tom Brennan
Single pilot freight so I am my own dispatcher most nights, which mostly means I am the guy who cannot be talked out of anything. I have started calling a friend before I launch into anything marginal, just to say it out loud. It works about as well as a real release desk and it is free.