The Evolution of Crew Panel - the 2019 summary

As for the Crew Panel functionality, our aim was to integrate all the necessary elements of crew planning and crew control into one easy to use and reliable application. For example, before the latest developments if you wanted to assign a simulator session with Journey Log details, you could only add it via the OPS section. We know how important it can be for currency purposes, therefore we have also included such option within Crew Panel.

Better usability and accessibility

The full list of features added in 2019 for Crew Panel is quite long, therefore we will focus here only on the most crucial ones. Probably one of the most useful features for scheduling purposes is the possibility to work with drafts of crew assignments, which allows to publish the planned duties manually for multiple crew members over the selected period of time. Such drafts can also be reverted in the same way by using an option to clear draft changes. To make the communication regarding roster changes much more efficient, we have implemented a crew notification system that sends an update with duty information to respective crew members. As with many other features in Leon, duty notifications can be customized with individual templates, consisting of the relevant data.

As we have mentioned before, our goal was to further improve user experience by consolidating the functionality related to crew planning into one module. Due to this philosophy, we have introduced the possibility to view FTL calculations for particular duties while setting up a draft, as well as added an option to apply FDP extensions directly via Crew Panel.

E a s y   a c c e s s   t o   F T L   c a l c u l a t i o n s   v i a  C r e w  P a n e l

There is also a huge number of quality-of-life features that augment the usability. From an autofill option when assigning duties, new keyboard shortcuts to new ways of sorting the crew during the assignment process (for example, those on “OFF” duties are marked and listed at the end), we have made a lot of effort to provide a seamless, time-effective experience with Crew Panel. Also, duty requests handled by Crew Panel are much more streamlined now, allowing to easily accept or decline them by the crew planner.

Not our final word, obviously

Our work is never completely done though. While we are polishing the current functionality, we are also planning to introduce some additional features that further improve the overall user experience with Crew Panel. One of the upcoming improvements will include the history view of flight/duty changes per individual crew member. With this change, it will be possible to check what changes were made (when and by whom) on a particular day in terms of his flight / duty assigned.

You can also expect some developments when it comes to the current layout of Crew Panel. We have already moved some elements from the left panel, such as particular filters, but in the near future other filters (for crew team as well) will be rearranged. Our idea is to make the main view less cluttered and obscured, meeting the high standards of today’s top web applications. Finally, as requirements of many CAA authorities often include information about releasing rosters 14 days in advance, we will be adding a date of roster publication to the system data.

We also have some great news for our clients using the Crew Duties view for managing their crew. Being a solution more suitable for business operators, there are further developments in the works at Leon that are expected to speed up and revamp the current functionality.

Don’t forget to check our Online Wiki, where you can learn about features Crew Panel brings to the table in detail.

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