Eric Clepper
Flight Support Services
Business and General Aviation
Can you believe we’re already half way through 2009! However, our Customer and Product Support team has been busy working on developing new Flight Support Services for our customers.
This month, we’re excited to be launching our new online Flight Planner and Information Management Tool based on valuable feedback received from our customers through focus groups, interviews and customer meetings.
If you’re unfamiliar with our Flight Support Services, it’s a subscription services available to business aviation customers and focuses on making their overall flight experience successful while reducing their workload. We accomplish this by providing services that assist the crew members in planning their flight, flight following and delay avoidance services, supporting the aircraft cabin communications such as blackberry, in-flight television news services, Internet, and phone, and providing up-to-date navigation databases for the aircraft’s flight management system.
Our new web-based tools focus on what really matters to our customers – access to accurate, relevant information specific to departure or destination locations, new data rich information sources such as those used for RAIM predictions and airport information, and a simplified workflow experience. The enhancements also include a more user-friendly, intuitive web experience with email/fax communicator, graphical presentations, flight planning interface, ETOP’s calculations and Google map interfaces.
RAIM predictions is a new complimentary service offered with every flight plan. Starting this month, GPS Receiver Autonomous Integrity Monitoring (RAIM) information is required by aircraft operators for pre-flight briefing if a standalone GPS is used to meet the RNAV requirement.
Our round-the-clock service and support tools help to familiarize operators with the new RNAV requirement. The flight plan output data will identify any outage that may affect any portion of the customer’s flight – including departure, en route, destination, alternate and terminal environment.
We still have a lot of work to do in creating new services that enhance our customers’ flying experience. Watch for continuous updates and enhancements – and better yet, be our partner by sharing your ideas to help shape the roadmap. A suggestion box is located on the new myGDC.com Web site.
I welcome your comments.
Eric
