Although a lot of people and projects all over the world tend to lay claim to being the originators of the CDM (Collaborative Decision Making) concept, this is something that came from the USA and it was originally an airline initiative which was later picked up and embraced also by the FAA and various airports in North America. One would think that CDM thrives in the US, what with all these years of continuous development…
Of course a lot had happened in the CDM arena since those early days but it seems the CDM culture is still not as deeply anchored in everyday operations as it should and could be.
I got suspicious when I saw an article in Jane’s Airport Review of May 2012, entitled “US addresses irregular operations”. It talks about new guidance published by the Transportation Research Board (TRB) which airports can use to develop their contingency plans required by the Department of Transportation (DOT).
The document in question is called Guidebook for Airport Irregular Operations (IROPS) Contingency Planning. It is meant for commercial airports that need to develop, update or evaluate their plans. This sounds like a good thing…
On reading further, however, the article states that “the guidebook seeks to address the issue that US airports and airlines have lacked effective coordination to serve passengers during severe delays and other contingencies.
Hmm… interesting. Of course we know that CDM has been found very useful for dealing with decision making in normal circumstances but why did it fail in irregular situations? That it did fail is beyond question. The example given in the article is the situation encountered in October 2011 when a severe snowstorm in the northeastern United States obliged airlines to divert to Bradley International in Connecticut. Apparently the airlines concerned did activate their own contingency plans but did not talk to other airlines or the airport for that matter… Consequence: nobody was really aware just how crowded the airport was becoming.
Have those guys never heard of Collaborative Decision Making? The hair on my back stood up even more when I read further in the article that Mr. Michael Nash of ATC Market Analysis, one of the guidebook’s authors, suggests that the simplest solution would be for airlines to contact the operations staff at the airport receiving the diverted traffic… Has he not heard of CDM either?
That the FAA actually does have a CDM program that should have covered this kind of situation long ago is almost irrelevant, apparently. We can learn from the article that the FAA is “considering” establishing a website on which airports could update their status for airlines to check… But there is more. The FAA is trying to collect opinions and views on the best way to “gather and share information collaboratively”.
The abbreviation CDM does not appear once in the article. It is possible that the author of the article is from the new generation who has not heard of CDM yet or of the old generation who has forgotten about CDM since nothing visible has happened for a long time… May be, just may be, this whole activity is part of the US CDM program.
But no matter which is the case, the fact remains, more than 20 years after the folks at US Airways first defined CDM, the airlines will still happily choke a diversion airport with apparently zero effort to do just a little bit of CDM.
What is this world coming to?