Hageland Aviation invests in new maintenance, operation controls

PALMER — Hageland Aviation Services is now soaring above Alaska in terms of safety, as the company has implemented a series of thorough safety and maintenance procedures.

In order to track and maintain the safety of its more than 900 flights per week, Hageland Aviation has developed two new and intense control centers: an Operations Control Center and a Maintenance Control Center.

The Maintenance Control Center is a way for mechanics and their supervisors to track maintenance on each of the 58 airplanes Hageland has in service. Pilot reports, repair updates, and service checkups are entered into a computer system the business calls the “Live Aircraft Status Page.” Thanks to this program, which was coded by Hageland IT staff, the operators of the Maintenance Control Center can control the availability of an aircraft depending on its state of repair.

“What we do every day is we release all aircraft out of maintenance,” said Maintenance Operations Manager Willy Rockwell. “It doesn’t matter if they come in for a landing light or a taxi light.”

In addition to monitoring repair status, the Maintenance Control Center can also successfully track when a plane is due for standard inspections and even ground a plane that has come into disrepair during a flight. The Live Aircraft Status Page is also able to report the progress of a repair, including the location of needed parts or the mechanic assigned to the job.

There is a Maintenance Control Center at each of the company’s hubs, which are located in Palmer, Fairbanks, and Bethel. At each of these centers Hageland has taken some of its most experienced mechanics out of the garage and made them operators in the Maintenance Control Center.

“We had to cherry pick five of our best people, take them out of the maintenance department, and put them in maintenance control,” said Director of Maintenance Mike Harris.

The work done in the Maintenance Control Center is then very crucial to what happens in the Operations Control Center. Unlike its counterpart, the Operations Control Center is solely located at Hageland’s Palmer base, and it is basically a dispatch center for all of Hageland’s daily flights.

Operators in the Operations Control Center receive calls from Hageland’s pilots and discuss with them their flight plans for the day. They assess the risk of a trip based on a number of things, including weather cameras, Federal Aviation Administration notices to airmen, the amount of time a pilot has flown recently, and the reports from Hageland’s Maintenance Control Center on the aircraft’s repair status.

“Before any pilots can depart one of our 10 stations to go on a flight, they have to call in to Palmer to the Operation Control Center to get a flight release,” said Greg Tanner, Operations Control Manager.

Based on the risk that an operator assigns to a certain flight itinerary, they can clear the plane for takeoff, delay a flight, or cancel a trip altogether. Some riskier cases allow the operators to involve a manager in the discussions that they may have with pilots, but ultimately the decision is up them. This latter quality is especially advantageous to Hageland’s pilots, according to Tanner.

“They are able to say ‘it’s Palmer making the ultimate decision on whether or not they’re permitted to fly’, so that’s a good thing for the pilots so they don’t face that pressure,” he said.

Thanks to tracking devices and a detailed monitoring system, operators are also able to see where any of Hageland’s planes are at any time. If an aircraft has in any way diverged from its itinerary, an operator checks the status of the airplane.

“We can not only see where they are currently, but we can pull up a history of exactly what that airplane has done, and so we know right where it’s at,” Tanner said.

Though the Maintenance Control Center and Operations Control Center are concepts adapted from Alaska Airlines operations, they are rather uncommon for air services of Hageland’s size.

Director of Operations, Luke Hickerson, said the FAA doesn’t have specify safety standards for airlines like Hageland. The business took it upon itself to implement such thorough programs, he said.

“(Our system) far exceeds any standard set by any federal or outside agency,” Luke said.

Hageland was initially fearful of both the costs and possible delay that implementing these systems could incur, but those days are long gone, according to company president Jim Hickerson.

“The fear was the system would grind to a halt and we would go bankrupt,” he said. “The reality is we’re safer than we’ve ever been, we’re flying more than we’ve ever flown, and our revenue is higher than it’s ever been.”

Hageland has been able to maintain competitive pricing on its tickets, but with that airfare comes the added value of security, according to the company’s president.

“You’re getting all this additional value for your ticket in the guise of safety, that others don’t provide anywhere near to the same level,” Hickerson said.

For more information, visit flyravn.com, or call 266-8394

Contact Kaden Weaver at 352-2270 or kaden.weaver@frontiersman.com.