Savannah, GA, January 31, 2008 – As Bill Garvey, moderator of Thursday’s Opening General Session (OGS) noted, many of today’s schedulers and dispatchers cannot imagine how they would do their jobs without their electronic tools: cell phones, PDAs and scheduling software.

However, Garvey, the editor-in-chief of Business and Commercial Aviation magazine, along with two retired NBAA Board members – Chuck McKinnon, founder of the IBM flight department, and Otto Pobanz, former flight department manager of Federated Department Stores – related stories from a bygone era, when there were no schedulers and dispatchers in business aviation and trip scheduling was done using simply a phone and a pad of paper.

Garvey started the session by providing an overview of the history of business aviation, noting that the industry did not blossom until after World War II, when scores of surplus wartime aircraft and ex-military aviators were used to meet American businesses’ growing need to travel quickly and efficiently. In the late 1940s and 1950s, converted, piston-powered airliners and former military transports were used to move business people around the country at previously unheard of speeds.

All that changed in 1958, a watershed year in which the FAA was created, the federal government began building a nationwide ATC system and the first turbine-powered aircraft specifically designed specifically for business flying, the Grumman Gulfstream, first flew.

World War II veteran pilots McKinnon and Pobanz were two people who laid the groundwork for modern business aviation by championing the development of a scheduling/dispatching function in their flight departments. Time did not allow the two pioneers to share all their memories during the session, but NBAA was able to sit down with Pobanz immediately after to learn more about the early days.

In the beginning, Pobanz himself used to sit by the phone in the hangar, waiting for the chairman’s secretary to call with a trip request. As more employees began to utilize the airplane, Pobanz had to resolve scheduling conflicts. Eventually, he asked for a list of authorized users and their respective priorities.

By 1960, Pobanz hired an assistant to take over the scheduling function, typing and circulating a list of requests to use the airplane. In 1971, he hired his first true scheduler, who not only fielded requests for use of the company aircraft, but also added other duties, from assigning flights to pilots and coordinating with the maintenance department, to booking ground transportation and crew hotels. It was at this point that Pobanz said he realized that the scheduler had become “a very vital part of our organization.”

Return to the main S&D News Bureau page.

Any person who attends an NBAA convention, conference, seminar or other program grants permission to NBAA, its employees and agents (collectively "NBAA") to record his or her visual/audio images, including, but not limited to, photographs, digital images, voices, sound or video recordings, audio clips, or accompanying written descriptions, and, without notifying such person, to use his or her name and such images for any purpose of NBAA, including advertisements for NBAA and its programs.