New Flight Mission Management Model of The Royal Thai Air Force Transport Aircraft New Flight Mission Management Model of The Royal Thai Air Force Transport Aircraft

Abstract

This descriptive research aims to develop a new flight management model for the airlift missions of the Royal Thai Air Force (RTAF). The results obtained from this method are studied including the reduction of overall operating costs.  The total of 1025 missions collected from the RTAF flight schedule data in FY2015 is chosen as a specimen. And for the purpose of this study, these selected missions can be assigned for any of six RTAF transport aircraft types, and always depart from Donmuang Airport. The specimen is scheduled with the new method and subsequently analyzed by the descriptive statistics. Also the Paired Sample t-test and Wilconxon Sign Rank test are applied for evaluating the operating cost improvement.

           As far as the results are concerned, the new flight-scheduling method primarily focuses on reducing the overall operating costs. This is performed by arranging the missions by the route distance in descending order, and selecting the aircraft with the lowest operating cost per hour if it is available in the fleets. The results show that the new method can provide a substantial cost    reduction of 20.4 percent with a statistical significance of p-value less than 0.05.

Key word: Flight mission management, Air force transport aircraft, Cost of transportation.