The Philosophy of Crew Planning
Every month, the same task is done: piecing together a new schedule for all of the crew members. And this is hardly an easy task, after all, it can take an entire month to make a schedule for the next month. On top of strict regulations, fatigue checks, union agreements, and more, schedulers need to balance the wants of the crew. Ultimately, only a handful can take this flight, and only a handful can take that trip. With everybody bidding and requesting their preferences, it becomes a difficult task to find a schedule that suits everybody.
"striving for the greater good to maximize overall satisfaction and choose trade-offs that benefit the majority."
While schedulers genuinely try to give everyone a piece of the pie, compromises have to be made. The question then becomes how to make fair trade-offs so the overall puzzle fits. Results may be upsetting or frustrating when a request for a weekend off is denied in favour of another bid. Yet, looking at the schedule from the perspective of the entire crew, these compromises serve the greater good.
That is the core principle of the philosophical idea of utilitarianism: striving for the greater good to maximize overall satisfaction and choose trade-offs that benefit the majority.
Applied to roster planning, it means making line compromises that create the highest possible satisfaction for the greatest number of pilots and cabin crew.
Of course, a scheduler wants to plan with the idea of the greater good in mind, but one would need to have an idea of what this embodies practically. Without a sense of what crew members find acceptable or unfavourable, this is like searching for a needle in a haystack. Even with preferences and bids, the scheduler might have a sense of the individual needs, but in striving for general satisfaction by the entire crew population, planners need deeper insights.
"Vocal outliers often drown out a more quiet, satisfied majority"
Insight into general sentiment towards certain aspects of airline schedules is hard to get. Vocal outliers often drown out a more quiet, satisfied majority. When planners rely only on ad-hoc feedback, they risk tweaking rosters to appease a louder minority while inadvertently disrupting patterns that the quiet majority actually enjoyed. How can you get a grasp on true collective sentiment while balancing comments from a vocal few?
We believe we have a solution with JiGSO for Airline Crew (JfAC). JiGSO is an employee experience platform that captures and measures crew satisfaction. The platform clearly reveals what drives satisfaction and to what degree across the entire fleet. By combining data analytics with machine learning, JfAC helps planners see the difference between a single crew member’s personal preference and a systemic trend that affects everyone. Instead of reading through hundreds of unstructured comments or relying on intuition, planning teams receive clear, quantifiable sentiment metrics alongside their operational data.
“It is about making informed, empathetic decisions backed by real data rather than guesswork.”
Ultimately, utilitarian crew planning isn’t about pleasing everyone 100% of the time. Although this is what we want, it is an operational impossibility. It is about making informed, empathetic decisions backed by real data rather than guesswork. For example, when a planner knows through targeted surveys that protecting a weekend rest block after a long-haul trip matters far more to crew than avoiding an early start, they can optimize schedules around what genuinely impacts well-being. When planners are equipped with this kind of clear sentiment intelligence, they can design schedules that respect operational limits while actively protecting crew well-being. That is true utilitarian planning in action: building rosters for the greater good of the entire airline.
