Incoming S & D Chairwoman Excited About Annual Conference

“It was awesome,” said Eve Gregory, incoming chairwoman of the NBAA Schedulers & Dispatchers Committee, describing this year’s NBAA Schedulers & Dispatchers Conference, held February 2 to 5 in San Jose, Calif. “There’s so much energy here; it inspires me every time. There are events from first thing in the morning till late at night and always an opportunity for networking, meeting new people and getting more knowledge and education. It’s so much fun and the energy here is just fabulous.”

A highlight of this year’s conference was the “live emergency response” drill held on the morning of February 5. During the session, the audience watched as peers acted out a fictitious company’s reaction to a simulated emergency, the crash of the company jet near “Metro Airport.”

“We got great feedback,” Gregory said. “As the drill was going on, the real emotion of an emergency happening live was felt by all the attendees. The best part was we got takeaways, some things we can do in our own flight departments as schedulers and dispatchers, that focal point of [who] might get the first call. We all came out of that with a little bit more knowledge than we had before we walked in, and hopefully we can carry those things also into next year and take it to the next step to help us be more prepared in emergency situations.”

For the coming year leading up to the 2016 Schedulers & Dispatchers conference in Tampa (January 19 to 22) Gregory wants to continue the process improvements that have helped make the conference so valuable. “I just want to continue to carry that on,” she said. “We have a passionate group of people that really take pride in this conference, from the ambassador team to all the volunteers required to put the show on to the scholarship committee, which has done a wonderful job of increasing awareness of scholarships and thanking our donors for scholarships. And also the program and evening events; this year was even better than last year.”

The main focus this year is to work with the education subcommittee to seek feedback from schedulers and dispatchers, advisory council committee members and conference attendees on what they would like to see at the Tampa conference. “We’ve got some feedback this year that we hope to apply to next year’s conference,” Gregory said. “And that’s my hope, every year to make improvements so that the attendees, the exhibitors, the schedulers and dispatchers, flight department managers, whoever does come to this conference, has a wonderful experience. And truly gets an education.”