One Three One decimal Nine (131.9 MHz)

The Red Arrows, the renowned British aerobatic team, were scheduled to perform their routines above the Muscat sky that evening because it was Muscat Festival time.

I went out with a load control who was interested in trying out live flight dispatching.

She felt sure she could handle things on her own because she had been guided through the process.

I was merely there to watch her first solo performance and to help her if anything went wrong.

As we were getting into the interesting phase of dispatching, she came running, stating that she was unable to get in touch with the boarding gates to get the clearance to board the flight.

I checked my handheld radio as well as the mobile phone, and both were unusable at the time, as the Red Arrows had already got into the air.

My thought on that was that some radio frequencies must have been disabled to stop any interference with communications between the performing aircraft.

We were parked in a far-flung remote bay and driving down to the gates would have lost many vital minutes.

Instead, I asked her to follow me.

We boarded the aircraft and went into the cockpit.

We introduced ourselves well first, and explained our predicament to the Pilot in Command, requesting his permission to use the aircraft radio to do our ground communications.

He agreed immediately to our request, not because the lady dispatcher was a novel thing and or she was a very pretty young lady, but because he understood the importance of on-time departure (OTP) more.

The PIC tuned in the radio to the company frequency, and Carol did the communication part of it well.

Operations Control too responded quickly because hearing a female voice on that frequency was a very rare thing.

While the Red Arrows were doing their stunts over the airport sky, Carol was doing her stunts well, scrambling up a few more times to use the aircraft radio and to attend to other needs.

Finally, that evening, only her flight left on the schedule and all others were 10 to 15 minutes behind their scheduled departure times.

All delays were finally attributed to ground communication breakdowns.

She was good under pressure and performed admirably in that situation.

Instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, one should be able to think creatively and make use of current resources to meet their needs.

The lesson from the situation is this.