Home > FICO

1 What is FICO?

FICO (Flight Information and Control of Operations) is the Operational Control system for British Airways and is used to control the flying programme on the day, for the BA fleet throughout the world.

FICO ’s Main Purpose:

1. To control and monitor the operation of the flight schedule on the day of operation.
2. To communicate the progress and changes to the operational schedule worldwide.
3. To act as a Legal record of aircraft and crew times.

Operational control consists of two key business needs of British Airways, firstly Airline Operations and secondly Flight Operations. In addition FICO provides other ancillary operational needs and manages information feeds to or from numerous other systems.

• Operational Control
  • Airline Operations - Programs that control the operation of many flights.
    • Flight & Aircraft Times/Locations - Programs that record movement information
    • Flight Allocation - Programs that assign an aircraft to a tour of duty.
    • Schedules - Programs to control the British Airways flight schedule for the season.
    • Aircraft - Programs controlling aircraft records.
    • Flight Updates - Programs to manage flights (e.g. re-routeing, canceling)
  • Flight Operations - Programs that control the operations of one particular flight
    • Crew Briefing - Programs to supply information needed by the crew of a flight.
    • Airbourne Time Slots - Programs to negotiate take-off time slots .
    • Met Data - Programs to supply weather information for a flight.
    • Ground-Aircraft communication (ACARS/AXIS) - The system that provides aircraft movement times.
• Ancillary Operations
  • Fuel - FICO receives planned and actual fuel figures from SWORD, DCS or DISC. FICO manages tank allocation and reports.
  • Aircraft Cleaning - FICO stores aircraft cleaning records and cleaning schedules and locations.
  • Aircraft De-Icing - A database to store aircraft de-iceing records (required by law).
  • Crew Rostering - Monthly and Ad Hoc feeds of crew rosters are fed into FICO from the BA crew database (Hermes).
  • Viewing and Sharing of Data
    • Standing Data
    • Contact Data
    • Airport Data
    • Free text d/base
    • Statistical Load Summaries
• FICO Links and Feeds
  • FICO communicates with various other systems

The FICO application was first developed in the early 70's and is predominantly SabreTalk (approximately 2650 segments), with some S390 Assembler (approximately 180 segments). It is run on a TPF mainframe.

2 Control of Airline Operations

Control of Operations can be split into 3 areas based on the time-scale of activity that occurs between when a flight is scheduled and when it actually gets airborne:

2.1 Strategic - pre-flight editing:

1. Season Load - The airline's published schedule of operation is divided into Summer and Winter seasons associated with the change to and from UK 'daylight saving time'. Two to three months before the start of each season the schedules information computer system (ISIS) sends the entire schedule for the new season to FICO in a process called the 'Season Load'.
2. Schedule Changes - The flying schedule can be altered. For example, the aircraft type assigned to a flight could be changed. This is usually done by ISIS. SSM messages are generated and tell FICO to modify it's schedule records.
3. Ad-Hoc Changes - This is tempory change to a flight that doesn't effect it's long term schedule. Ops Planning and Ops Control units are able to make Ad Hoc changes to the published schedule in two ways. An Ad Hoc Message (ASM) or equivalent FICO command will change the relevant data for the specified flight without affecting the schedule information for that flight.

2.2 Planning - Aircraft Management:

1. Unallocated Tours - A flight operates as part of a tour defined in the long term schedule. An aircraft tour can be defined as "the sectors an aircraft is scheduled to operate in a given period of time." With shorthaul services, a tour will normally run from midnight to the following midnight and will consist of all flights flown by that aircraft in that period. In longhaul services, a tour consists of all the flights undertaken by that aircraft from the time it leaves its home base until the time it returns. Tours are normally organised by using the planning computer system (PULSAR) and cover a period up to 8 days into the future. The tours will continue to be revised up to the evening before the day of operation at which stage their "ownership" is handed over to FICO. Changes can then be made to the plan and the tours can be updated within the FICO system as and when required. The primary flight records for a particular flight are created in FICO 42 days prior to the date of operation. Initially, a flight is in 'tour zero' which indicates that it has no associations with any other flights. Eight days before operation, reintegration (REINT) messages are received by FICO from the ISIS flight planning system which group numbers of flight sectors into an un-allocated tour. The tour must be geographically feasible, contain only planned aircraft configurations appropriate to the fleet, have planned departure and arrival times that are chronologically correct and each arrival and departure must be separated by sufficient time to allow for the minimum turnround time.
2. Allocation - The process of associating a tour with a particular aircraft is called allocation and is the responsability of the Ops Control department. The day before the tour date, Ops Planning passes over the following day's tours to Ops Control who use the Pulsar system to send allocation commands to FICO.