Flight schedulers master art of change

Published July 24, 2012
By 1st Lt. Zach Anderson
931st Air Refueling Group Public Affairs

MCCONNELL AIR FORCE BASE, Kan. -- It was 4 a.m. and already Master Sgt. Miranda "Mindi" Beyer had a problem. Or rather, an aircraft had a problem, which essentially meant Beyer had a problem as well.

"The phone rang and I was told one of our jets was broken and wouldn't be flying," said Beyer. "Then I was asked, 'So how do we want to handle this?'"

Beyer, a traditional reservist assigned to the 931st Air Refueling Group here, is a flight scheduler. It's her job, and the job of other schedulers, to build flying missions, coordinate with other units for the air refueling of receiver aircraft, and ensure the timing all works out right.

It's also the scheduler's job to come up with a solution when something goes wrong.

Case in point: A tanker with a maintenance issue that prevents it from making its scheduled flight.

"That's when you have to get creative," said Master Sgt. Warren "Bear" Bearup, a 931st refueling boom operator who also works as a long-range scheduler. "Sometimes you have to cancel the sortie until you can get the jet fixed, but you try to do as much as you can to avoid that."

In this case, Beyer was able to quickly coordinate swapping a working aircraft for the broken one, which kept everything flowing smoothly and the missions running as scheduled.

It may sound a bit hectic, but it's the routine for the men and women in the 931st scheduling office.

"It's the kind of job where you have to be able to see the big picture and understand the different factors involved in order to make the decisions on how to get things to work out right," said Beyer.

While the most visible part of the 931st flying mission may be the actual air refueling, scheduling is what makes that possible. Day in and day out, schedulers are constantly in contact with receiver aircraft units around the globe coordinating missions, working to set refueling times, and essentially planning when and where 931st aircraft will be on any given day.

Bearup deals primarily with long-range scheduling, which means any mission that is off-station.

"I work on missions such as coordinating with the C-5 school house at Lackland Air Force Base or with the aeromedical evacuation school house at Pope Field," he said. "I also go out and schedule our business efforts."

Missions known as "business efforts" involve a 931st aircraft staying at another base for a designated period of time to support local air refueling missions.

"Lately we've been doing a lot of those in Alaska," said Bearup. "There is only one tanker unit up there, and the units at Elmendorf Air Force Base need help. We'll send an aircraft up there for a week at a time to support them."

These types of missions require a high degree of communication and coordination, Bearup said.

"It's a lot of back and forth," he said. "I'm constantly exchanging e-mails with the unit in Alaska. They will send me their schedule of what they need to be doing that week, and then I work on building the missions to meet those needs and get their refueling taken care of."

Beyer works in the short-range scheduling department, where the focus is on local missions that originate and end at McConnell. The short-range schedulers average around twenty local flights per week, which means plenty of organizing, planning and constant adaptation to change.

"We will contact the receiver units if they haven't already contacted us to schedule the air refueling," said Beyer. "The receiver will schedule the actual airspace itself, and then it's really just a matter of going off our planning sheets and building the mission in the Global Decision Support System for the world to see."

She continued, "Once you start to understand the airspace and how the planes maneuver, you can make sure it is planned appropriately and that the airspace is scheduled right. Then it's just working with mission plans to build the mission."

That is when everything goes as planned. However, in the world of scheduling, everything running as scheduled is a rarity.

"Change is always happening and the missions evolve all the time," said Bearup. "Some are easy to deal with and some are very time consuming, where you are on the phone, trying to contact people and figure out what they need, what needs to happen when, that type of thing."

Beyer said that's the challenge that keeps the job interesting.

"The changes really kind of make it fun. It keeps you on your toes, and you aren't doing the same thing day in and day out. It's always different day-to-day," she said.

The ability to successfully adapt to a sudden change is the ultimate in job satisfaction for schedulers.

"Doing something like this, people are relying on you," said Bearup. "If something gets really messed up and I can come in and fix it and get it hammered out so that everyone is pleased with how things end up working out, that's a really good feeling."

Beyer agrees it's enjoyable to be able to help make a mission happen when things seem to be unraveling.

"When things fall apart and you put them back together again, that's the best part of the job," she said. "When you can scramble and find one of our tankers and receivers already in the air, coordinate with them on who is going where and when they need to be there to do a refueling, that's pretty cool."