Cyprus Airways flight crew first to access rosters with mobile phones as part of SITA Flight Ops

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Cyprus Airways flight crews will be the first to benefit from a new feature of SITA’s Flight Ops portfolio which allows airline crew to use their own smart phones to access roster details and to improve crew morale through better communication of roster changes.

Katia Hadjikyriacou, Cyprus Airways CIO, said: “In addition to the many other essential components of SITA’s CrewWatch and FleetWatch solutions, SITA was able to demonstrate a new module, namely mobile access to rosters and aircraft schedules via smart phones and PDAs. SITA and Cyprus Airway’s IT Department have worked together to shape the look and feel of the final release and set-up the necessary security compliant architecture.

“We are very pleased with this new feature as airline crews are a very mobile workforce and this can create challenges in terms of accessing up to date information to make work and home life decisions. SITA helps ease this work/life balance issue through allowing crew to access roster details via an intuitive and secure online graphical user interface.”

Included in a $4 million deal with SITA, Cyprus Airways has also embarked on a major upgrade to the airline’s communications network which will interconnect all the airline’s sites via an IP VPN with increased bandwidth and improved access to IP-based airline applications for all sites.

Toby Tucker, SITA Director, Flight Operations, said: “We are happy that Cyprus Airways is joining the growing numbers of airlines worldwide choosing our complete Flight Ops portfolio. Mobile access is a perfect support to CrewWatch which allows an airline to manage the assignment of its crew members and to monitor these assignments through to their completion, ensuring any disruption of the plan is controlled and changes fully managed.

“It complements FleetWatch which reduces costs through improved aircraft use and better on-time performance by keeping track of an aircraft’s progress, offering immediate response options to any disruption and minimising impact on planned schedules.”

A recent case study carried out with the US airline, Comair, found that the efficiencies and savings delivered by FleetWatch’s recovery capability paid for the system within six months.