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Civil Air Patrol

Air Academy Cadet Squadron

Quarterly Schedule Template

(Last Mod: 04 November 2010 17:56:09 )

This schedule is designed so that a large number of cadets can be serviced using limited resources. The basic idea is that instead of, for instance, testing all of the cadets in the unit at one time, only about one-quarter of them are tested in a given session but, of course, there are four times as many sessions. In general, it is usually (not always) easier to provide a smaller service multiple times than to provide a large service a single time.

Pipelined Schedule Basics

You might be asking what a "Pipelined Schedule" is. Imagine that you are in charge of issuing a bunch of equipment to a large group of people, say one hundred. You need to issue them a uniform, camping gear, and academic materials. You also need to have them fill out some forms. Let's assume, for the same of discussion, that each of these takes about an hour provided you have eight workers to help out. You could have everyone come all at once and first issue everyone their uniform. Then, once all the uniforms are issued, you issue all the camping gear. After that is finished, you hand out all of the academic materials. Finally, once everything else is done, you have them fill out all of the forms. This is known as "batch processing", wherein everyone is doing the same thing at the same time and you finish one thing completely before you move on to the next thing.

There is nothing wrong with doing things this way and, many times, it is the most natural and reasonable way to approach things. But it has its drawbacks and limitations. What if you don't have a room that is large enough to handle all one hundred people? Let's say that you have four rooms that can each easily accommodate thirty or so. You could reasonably set up to issue the academic materials in all four rooms and just split the people up and send twenty-five to each room, but that may not work with the uniforms since you are likely to run out of a particular size of a particular item in one room even though you have plenty overall. Further, let's assume that it takes eight workers to adequately service a hundred people. If done in batch, all eight workers have to be trained to do all four tasks. If the tasks are such that having them all cross-trained is not feasible, then you could need as many as thirty-two workers to adequately get things done, even though at any given time you only need eight.

Now, consider another option that you have when, like this scenario, it really doesn't matter what order the four tasks are done in. This allows you to  set up each room for a different task. One room is set up to issue uniforms, one to issue camping gear, one to hand out the academic materials, and one to take care of the paperwork. You now split the hundred people into four groups of twenty-five each and send each group to a different room. We still need a total of eight workers, but we can split them up as well and put two in each room. Once everyone in each room has taken care of whatever it is that is being done in that room, everyone (except the workers) shift to a different room. After a total of four time periods, everyone has been in each of the four rooms and has taken care of everything that needs to be done. As an added benefit, notice that each worker only had to be trained on one of the four areas and, since they perform that task multiple times, they have the opportunity to get good at it. This is known as "pipelined processing", wherein different people are doing different things at any given time and people are following each other as they work through all of the stages of the pipe.

This is not to say that a pipelined schedule solves every problem or that it doesn't bring with it a few of its own. The biggest problem with a pipelined schedule is that the organization has to be much better up front. Trying to "wing it" just doesn't work as well. Also, you may not need as much of a resource at a given time, but what you do need you need for longer overall. For instance, let's say that uniform issue has to be done in a room that has mirrors and sewing machines and tape measures and such. Assuming that the room was big enough and enough workers were available, you would only have to reserve this room for one hour if doing it in batch while you would have to have it reserved for all four hours using the pipeline. Similarly, a worker whose only task was to issue uniforms would only be needed for one hour under the batch processing method but would need to be available for all four hours under the pipelined method. Depending on the situation, it may be easier to get large rooms for a shorter amount of time or smaller rooms for a longer amount of time. Similarly, it might be easier to get eight people for an hour each or it might be easier to find just two people that can stay for an hour. Actually, this last point is not as bad as it seems. In a batch mode you would have to have eight uniform workers since eight workers are issuing uniforms simultaneously. But in the pipelined case you only need two uniform workers at any given time, so you have a lot more options. For instance, you could still schedule eight workers that each have to work one hour, they just aren't doing it all at the same time. Or you could schedule four people to work two hours each. You can even get more flexible and perhaps you have one person that can work all four hours and another person that can work the middle two hours, now you just find one person that can work the first hour and one that can work the last hour and you are done.

Applying this concept to our Monday night meeting schedule, we essentially have the following four items that all cadets are expected to participate in each month: Moral Leadership (ML), Cadet Physical Fitness Test (CPFT), Physical Training (PT), and Achievement Testing (AT). Each one of these should only require half a meeting. If we had, say, thirty cadets then we could feasibly do this in batch requiring only a couple of senior members to support each item. But when we have numbers on the order of one hundred cadets, this is not very realistic. For instance, conducting a Moral Leadership session with over a hundred cadets is not nearly as effective as a smaller group of thirty cadets where individuals can participate more freely and fully. Performing the CPFT with this many cadets requires significantly more space and equipment than doing it with thirty. Similarly, doing a PT event, be it volleyball, basketball, ultimate frisbee, or whatever, is much harder to do well with a hundred than with thirty. Finally, conducting Testing with a hundred cadets requires a much larger room and many more copies of the tests than we like to maintain.

Taking into account that two of these activities, CPFT and PT, should normally be done in a gym whereas the other two, ML and AT, should normally be done in a classroom environment and that the gym and the classrooms are separated by several miles, we can work out a two stage pipelined schedule wherein we devote two meetings a month to these four tasks. On the first of these meetings we have half of the cadets meet at the gym to do CPFT and PT. The other half will meet in the classroom and do ML and AT. For the second of these meetings, the two groups simply swap places. In a similar fashion, at each of these meetings half of the group that went to the gym will do the CPFT first while the other half will do PT and then, during the second half, they swap. The same applies in the classroom area where half do ML and half do AT and then swap for the second half of the meeting.

Recalling that a pipelined schedule requires greater organization up front, we need to have a simple and reliable way for everyone to know what they are doing and where they need to be for any given meeting. In theory we could all meet in one place for opening formation and then divide everyone up into their groups and have them proceed to their separate areas. However, given the separation of the gym and classroom and the lack of sufficient transportation (not to mention the time involved), it is far better to divide them up before the meeting and have them report directly to where they need to be. Fortunately, the military organizational structure that is an intrinsic part of the Cadet Program can be leveraged to make this happen very cleanly. If we want four groups we simply assign the cadets to four flights and then post a schedule indicating where each flight reports for each meeting.

Flight Structure

In order for a pipelined schedule to work best, the flights should be reasonably well balanced and consist of the following structure:

• Commander

• Flight Sergeant

• Element Leaders (4)

• Ass't Element Leaders (4) (optional for Focus Flights)

• Element Members (8 to 12)

Having four elements is a consequence of the Template Schedule in which flights are frequently split in two so as to interact with elements of the other flights.

Total flight size ranges from a minimum of 14 to a maximum of 22. The ideal flight size is 18.

Squadron Structure

The Template Schedule assumes two Basic Training Flights and four regular flights (a Core Flight and three Focus Flights). These flights are designated as follows:

• A Flight: Core Flight (A Focus Flight whose focus is the Cadet Program)

• B Flight: Focus Flight

• C Flight: Focus Flight

• D Flight: Focus Flight

• E Flight: Basic Training Flight

• F Flight: Basic Training Flight

The schedule assumes that the two BTF flights will primarily be working with their own curriculum and the purpose of the Template Schedule is to deconflict them with the regular flights and to schedule the services they need, such as testing, that they cannot provide internally.

Combined Flight Schedule

• C - CPFT

• M - Moral Leadership

• P - PT

• T - Testing

To see how this works, let's assume that you are a cadet assigned to the 2nd Element in 'D' Flight and next Monday is the 6th meeting of the quarter. What are you doing in the first half of the meeting? Looking under 'D' and then under '2' and across from '6' on the left hand side, we see that 'C' is on top and 'P' is on the bottom. This means that you will be doing CPFT in the first half of the meeting and PT in the second half.

Schedule Template

The material from this point on is for those that want to know how the Combined Flight Schedule was developed.

Note that the schedule above for the two BTF flights is only one of many possibilities.

Over the course of the quarter, every flight is paired with every other flight for ML, PT, CPFT, and Testing. However, this in and of itself does not permit any interaction between the flights since they are still doing different things. To achieve the intermixing, the flights are broken each into two halves of two elements each and paired up with two elements from the other flight. Just as the schedule pairs each flight with every other flight over the course of a quarter, the flights are broken up so that each element is paired with every other element over the course of the quarter. This is accomplished according to following rotation:

The above table requires some explanation. Each month, every flight has two interactions with the flight it is paired up with, once for PT/CPFT and the other for ML/Testing. In each such pairing, there is a "low" flight and a "high" flights, based on the alphabetic designation of the flight with 'A' Flight being the lowest and 'D' Flight being the highest (since 'E' and 'F' Flights are not paired up with the regular flights this way). So when 'A' and 'B' Flights are paired up, 'B' flight is the 'high' flight while when 'B' and 'C' flights are paired up 'B' Flight is the 'low' flight.

So with this in mind, figuring out which elements are paired from each flight on any given meeting is straight forward. For instance, in Meeting #12, Flights 'B' and 'C' are scheduled to do PT/CPFT. Of these two flights, 'B' Flight is the 'low' flight. Since this is the Second Interaction of these two flights during this Pairing, Elements 1 and 4 from 'B' Flight are paired with Elements 2 and 3 from 'C' Flight. It follows directly that Elements 2 and 3 from 'B' Flight are paired with Eements 1 and 4 from 'C' Flight.

Notice that this doesn't say which pair of Elements does PT first and which does CPFT first. In most regards, it doesn't matter. However, so as to mix up the experiences of each cadet as much as possible in terms of which they do first and which they do second, consider the Template Schedule as applying strictly to the 1st Element of the 'low' Flight. So since 'B' Flight is scheduled to do PT first during Meeting #12, Elements 1 and 4 of 'B' Flight do PT with Elements 2 and 3 of 'C' Flight during the first half of the meeting.

Flight Schedules

While the Template Schedule contains all of the information needed to determine what each element of each flight is doing during each half of each meeting, it is not well suited to quickly determining this information. What is needed is an organization of the above information that makes it easy for a given member of a flight to determine what they are doing at any given time. This is easily done using a detailed Flight Schedule for each flight.

Combined Flight Schedule

• C - CPFT

• M - Moral Leadership

• P - PT

• T - Testing

How Many Meeting are in a Quarter?

Each calendar quarter has the following number of Mondays in it:

• Q1 (Jan/Feb/Mar) - 90 or 91 days - 12 to 13 Mondays

• Q2 (Apr/May/Jun) - 91 days - 13 Mondays

• Q3 (Jul/Aug/Sep) - 92 days - 13 to 14 Mondays

• Q4 (Oct/Nov/Dec) - 92 days - 13 to 14 Mondays

Which holidays do we cancel meetings for?

We can't cancel meetings for all, or even most, holidays since so many of them are celebrates on a Monday. The major holidays that we cancel meetings for are:

• New Year's Day (Jan 1)

• Memorial Day (Last Monday in May)

• Independence Day (Jul 4 - but generally celebrated on the nearest Monday to it)

• Labor Day (First Monday in September)

• Christmas (Dec 25)

For the first calendar quarter, the only time that there are only 12 Mondays is in non-leap years in which the first Monday is on Jan 7th. There are 13 Mondays in all other years. Thus we can cancel the meeting for New Year's Day and still have 12 meetings.

For the second calendar quarter, there are exactly 13 Mondays and hence we can cancel the meeting on Memorial Day and still have 12 meetings.

For the third calendar quarter, there are 13 Mondays except for, on average, once every 7 years in which case there are 14. However, there are two holidays during this quarter for which we normally cancel the meeting. Hence we can only count on 11 meetings in this quarter.

For the fourth quarter, there are 13 Mondays except for, on average, once every 7 years in which case there are 14. Although we normally only lose the Monday meeting that falls between Christmas and New Year's, there are times that both of these holidays are on a Monday or Tuesday leading us to cancel two meetings. If both of the holiday eves are on Monday, then we lose two Mondays in December. However, this can only happen if the first Monday of the quarter is also on a Monday and hence when there are 14 Monday's in the quarter. Therefore as long as we don't cancel any meetings prior to Christmas Eve, we will have 12 meetings.