Learning Objectives

• Explore the complexity of production scheduling

• Identify how meal production is managed

• Understand tray assembly and flight assembly processes

• Understand how flight production units are organised and staffed

Introduction

This chapter focuses on how food, beverages and equipment are prepared and assembled on a daily basis, prior to their transportation and loading onto the aircraft. There are three main elements to this the preparation of materials (hot and cold food, beverages, equipment), tray assembly, and flight assembly. The following explains how each of these processes may be carried out, based on the typical practice across a number of flight kitchens operated by many different companies. For any specific operation, there will be local variations because of a number of factors, such as:

• the size of the operation

• the complexity and/or sophistication of the flight service

• the number of airlines handled by the facility

• the number of flights serviced during the day

• the duration of the flights serviced

Organisation of Production Unit

Before looking at production planning and operational activity, it is necessary to understand how a typical production unit might be organised. The traditional approach to this is to organise the unit so that under the unit general manager there would be managers responsible for different parts of the operation. Thus, there would be operational managers in charge of food production (often called Executive Chef), purchasing and stores, equipment handling (concentrating on offloading and ware washing), and transportation. In addition there would be functional managers responsible for human resources,...