Team
TOM ZORMAN
Mission Planning/Control, Flight Dispatch
Born: April 29, 1966 in Zagreb, Croatia. Nationality: Croatian
With more than 20 years experience of operations management, Tom Zorman has brought his strategic planning skills to the supervision of this project.
Having been Croatia Airlines manager of Flight Operations Services, he advanced his career with Farnair Switzerland and Hello AG. In 2007 he joined Sonnig SA’s team in Geneva. Tom is an FAA licensed flight dispatcher and instructor for the Jeppesen Academy, a network of international aviation training centres.
On this mission, he is responsible for the planning and co-ordination of the whole trip: route planning, flight plan calculations, checking the feasibility of airports, obtaining all the permits and ensuring all formalities are taken care of, monitoring the weather and other parameters ahead of take off, making constant detailed analyses en route, co-ordinating the flight crew and ground services, assessing all the risks, and reacting quickly to any problems which threaten the mission.
Tom has a great deal of responsibility on his shoulders, both before and during the flight.
“Riccardo said he had a crazy idea, and when he told me what it was I nearly fell off my chair.
“We quickly agreed on a concept: Ten legs, each about 2000 nautical miles in the mid-northern hemisphere, where the winds are most favourable for an eastbound trip.
“FAI rules dictate that to set the record, you need to fly a minimum of 36,770km. Working out the route was not an easy task. Imagine taking a piece of string, 36,770km long, which you have to span across the globe, linking it to 10 or more airports. Whenever you move the string it becomes too short or too loose. In the end I had to add one airport to make it viable. An 11th leg – adding another hour to the trip. But the total flight distance of 36,774km is almost the exact FAI minimum. In planning terms, route can be considered as perfection.
“There are few other routes which are about 200 nautical miles longer and those will serve as a back-up. With the exception of Petropavlovsk, we are familiar with all the airports we’re using.
“We will only have true knowledge of the weather we’re to face 48 hours before we fly, but when planning our route I researched weather reports for late January dating back for the last 40 years. So long as 2010 isn’t significantly different from its weather history, we should be close to the limits but still ok.
“Analyses and planning are, up to a point, only able to support the extraordinary flying skills necessary to complete this trip successfully. I’m sure he’s too modest to agree, but Riccardo is one of very few people in the world capable of fulfilling this mission.”
