FC5203

My employer has introduced a brand-new electronic replacement briefing and flight planning  application. The purpose seems to be because a new back-end system has been introduced to our flight planning and the flight crew must switch briefing systems to be compatible. This system has a number of bugs and negative features that have been highlighted to the company by a huge number of flight crew. They include:

– Inadequate NOTAM presentation with significantly less filtering than previously

– Poor presentation of enroute weather

– Aircraft MEL items hidden in the OFP

– Completely new briefing flow

Flight crew have been required to self-brief on this new application with minimal, poorly designed CBT and no formal time allocated for them to do so. As an example of the major issues the company has had to release a 9-page notice on how to do fuel checks in the new app.

Although a limited parallel run was attempted, it was not available at all for some fleets, and on others the flight plans were on completely different routings so no possible training benefit could be realised.

As it stands the current application is inadequate. The company are aware of a number of bugs and have listed them as “improvements coming” but have elected to launch anyway. This has massively increased pilot workload and increases the risk of:

– aircraft dispatching with incorrect fuel

– aircraft dispatching without taking account of MEL items

– incorrect flight plan fuel being missed

– hugely increased time required to brief leading to pressure on other aspects of the operation.

I feel that note should have been taken of concerns raised by a significant portion of the pilot group across various types the airline operates and the launch delayed until those concerns were addressed. I would like this issue properly to be raised with the regulator who may not be aware of the concerns reported mainly via a dedicated company reporting form for this application rather than the ASR route.