16.5 Flight Following, Overdue Aircraft & Post-Flight Duties

16.5 Flight Following, Overdue Aircraft & Post-Flight Duties

A dispatch release is a prediction. Flight following is the process of continuously testing that prediction against reality and amending it when reality wins. Part 65 Appendix A names this explicitly: section VIII.B.4, in-flight operational control — situational awareness, information exchange, and flight release amendments — and section VIII.B.5, post-flight — arrival verification, weather debrief, and irregularity reports. Sections VII.C and VII.D add the FAA's responsibilities and services and the collection and dissemination of overdue and missing aircraft information.

The legal anchor is 14 CFR § 121.533: in domestic operations the certificate holder is responsible for operational control, and the dispatcher is jointly responsible with the PIC for the initiation, continuation, diversion, and termination of a flight. Continuation is the word that makes flight following a regulatory duty rather than a service.

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1. The Continuing Duty (Appendix A VIII.B.4)

The one-sentence test. If new information would have changed the release had you known it before departure, it requires action now.

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2. What the Dispatcher Actually Monitors

The fuel check is the discipline that catches almost everything else. A flight that is progressively behind its flight-plan fuel is telling you something — stronger headwinds, a lower-than-planned altitude, a configuration problem, or an undetected performance penalty — long before any of those appear as an event.

The Standing Questions

For every flight on the desk, at every check:

1. Is the fuel still legal at the destination and at the filed alternate?
2. Is the destination still forecast at or above minimums at ETA, and is the alternate still at or above its derived C055 minimums?
3. Has anything changed that requires a release amendment?
4. If this flight had to divert in the next 30 minutes, where would it go, and does it have the fuel?

Question 4 is the one that separates flight following from flight watching.

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3. Restriction and Suspension (§ 121.551)

Section 121.551 is the regulation candidates forget exists. It is not an emergency authority; it is a normal-operations obligation. When en route or terminal conditions deteriorate to the point that flights cannot be conducted safely — a line of severe convection across an arrival corridor, a destination reporting hazardous windshear, a runway contamination state beyond the aircraft's approved data — the dispatcher and the PIC must restrict or suspend operations until conditions permit safe continuation. In practice a dispatcher exercises this by holding departures, capping arrival rates into an affected station, or stopping the operation into an airport outright.

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4. Overdue and Missing Aircraft (Appendix A VII.C and VII.D)

The FAA and ATC Chain

Air traffic control provides an alerting service to every IFR flight and to VFR flights on a flight plan. Under FAA Order JO 7110.65, a controller considers an aircraft overdue when neither communications nor radar or ADS-B contact can be established and 30 minutes have elapsed since the aircraft's ETA over a specified or compulsory reporting point, its arrival at a clearance limit, or its clearance void time. The ARTCC then issues an ALNOT (Alert Notice), which triggers a communications and ramp check along the route of flight.

The ICAO emergency phases, used internationally and mirrored in U.S. practice, escalate in order:

Search and Rescue Coordination

Emergency Locator Transmitters operating on 406 MHz are detected and located through the COSPAS-SARSAT satellite system, which encodes registration data identifying the aircraft and operator. Satellite processing of the older 121.5 MHz ELT signal was terminated on February 1, 2009; 121.5 MHz remains useful only for short-range homing by aircraft and ground teams.

The Dispatcher's Overdue Procedure

When a flight cannot be raised and is not progressing:

1. Exhaust the communication paths — ACARS, company VHF, SELCAL/HF, SATCOM, ATC relay (Section 17.4).
2. Verify with ATC — confirm the last known position, altitude, and time, and whether the sector still has the target.
3. Query the stations — the destination, the alternate, and en route fields may already have the aircraft on the ground with a failed radio or a failed ACARS.
4. Compute remaining endurance from the last known fuel state; the moment planned endurance expires without contact, the situation is a distress condition, not an uncertainty.
5. Activate the carrier's Emergency Response Plan and notify company management and the FAA.
6. Notify the NTSB under 49 CFR § 830.5(b) — immediately and by the most expeditious means available — when the aircraft is overdue and is believed to have been involved in an accident.
7. Preserve everything — under 49 CFR § 830.10, records including the dispatch release, flight plan, load manifest, weather package, NOTAM package, and all communication logs must be secured and impounded, not amended or tidied.

[!WARNING] Trap: § 830.5(b) is a separate notification trigger from the twelve incident triggers of § 830.5(a). An overdue aircraft believed involved in an accident is notifiable in its own right, without waiting for confirmation of damage or injury.

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5. Post-Flight Duties (Appendix A VIII.B.5)

Arrival Verification

The flight is not closed when it lands; it is closed when the dispatcher verifies it landed. The ACARS IN event, an ATC or station confirmation, or crew contact all serve. An unverified arrival is an unclosed loop — and unclosed loops are exactly how an overdue aircraft goes unnoticed during a busy shift.

Records and Retention — 14 CFR §§ 121.695 and 121.697

Under § 121.695 (domestic and flag; § 121.697 for supplemental):

• The PIC must carry to the destination a copy of the completed load manifest (or the information from it), the dispatch release, and the flight plan;
• The certificate holder must keep copies of those documents at the airport of departure or another designated place; and
• The certificate holder must retain the documents for at least 3 months.

This retention window is why a dispatcher never edits a release after the fact. Amendments are issued as numbered amendments; the record is the legal history of the flight.

Weather Debrief

Compare what was forecast with what occurred:

• Did the TAF verify at ETA, or did the front arrive two hours early?
• Did the flight encounter the forecast turbulence, icing, or windshear, and were PIREPs filed? Filing a PIREP is the § 121.561 obligation in its most ordinary form, and it is the input the next dispatcher and the next crew will rely on.
• Did the actual winds aloft match the planned winds, and by how much?

Fuel and Performance Variance

Compare planned versus actual burn. Persistent positive variance on a route or tail number signals a cost-index or performance-degradation issue; persistent negative variance signals systematic over-fueling and an unnecessary cost of carry (Section 16.1).

Irregularity Reporting

Anything that departed from the plan gets documented while it is fresh: diversions, returns to field, holding beyond plan, MEL-driven limitations, ground events, medical events, and turbulence injuries. The outputs feed the carrier's delay coding and irregular operations (IROPS) analysis, and — separately and voluntarily — the Aviation Safety Action Program (ASAP) and the NASA-administered Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS), which are the mechanisms that surface the latent conditions discussed in Section 17.1. A diversion that is closed out with nothing but a delay code teaches the organization nothing.

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Common ADX Exam Traps

1. Believing operational control ends at the release signature. Section 121.533 names continuation, diversion, and termination.
2. Confusing § 121.551 with emergency authority. Restriction and suspension is a normal-operations duty; § 121.557 is the emergency deviation authority.
3. Missing § 830.5(b). Overdue-and-believed-involved-in-an-accident is its own NTSB notification trigger.
4. Getting the retention period wrong. Section 121.695 requires the release, flight plan, and load manifest to be kept for 3 months.
5. Assuming 121.5 MHz ELTs are satellite-monitored. Satellite processing of 121.5 MHz ended on February 1, 2009; 406 MHz is the satellite-detected frequency.