Operational control and joint responsibility

Operational control is the idea the rest of dispatch regulation hangs from. Almost every exam question about authority, delay, diversion or release is really asking whether you understand who holds it and what they may do with it.

What operational control means

14 CFR 1.1 defines operational control of a flight as the exercise of authority over initiating, conducting or terminating a flight. Note the three verbs. Operational control is not about flying the aircraft. It is about the decision to start a flight, to keep it going, and to end it.

Under 14 CFR 121.533, the certificate holder is responsible for operational control in domestic operations. The certificate holder is the airline itself, not any individual. The airline then delegates the exercise of that authority to two people for each flight: the pilot in command and the aircraft dispatcher.

The joint responsibility

The pilot in command and the aircraft dispatcher are jointly responsible for the preflight planning, delay and dispatch release of a flight in compliance with the regulations and the operations specifications. Joint means both. Neither one releases a flight alone, and neither one can be overruled into releasing a flight they consider unsafe.

• The pilot in command has full control and authority in the operation of the aircraft, without limitation, over other crew members and their duties during flight time, whether or not those crew members hold valid certificates.
• The aircraft dispatcher is responsible for monitoring the progress of each flight, issuing the information necessary for the safety of the flight, and cancelling or redispatching a flight if in the opinion of the dispatcher or the pilot in command the flight cannot operate or continue to operate safely as planned or released.

When continuing becomes an emergency

Neither the pilot in command nor the dispatcher may allow a flight to continue toward an airport to which it has been dispatched if, in their opinion, the flight cannot be completed safely, unless in their opinion there is no safer procedure. In that event, continuation toward that airport is an emergency situation.

This is one of the most misread sentences in Part 121. It does not say the flight may never continue. It says that if continuing is genuinely the safest of the options available, continuing is permitted, and the situation is by definition an emergency with all the authority that carries.

What the certificate holder keeps

The airline retains responsibility for operational control at the organisational level even though individuals exercise it flight by flight. That is why operations specifications, manuals, training programmes and the dispatch system itself are approved at certificate level. A dispatcher exercising authority is doing so inside a system the certificate holder answers for.