Flight Kitchens

Name :KRITIKA PALBatch :01

INTRODUCTION

•Flight Catering•Flowchart•Health & Safety

What is Flight Catering ?

Flight catering means providing food and beverages on board.

The first regular airline passenger service began in 1919 in Europe and the initial service included sandwiches tea and coffee but in the mid 1930s hot meals began to be served.

The huge increase in air traffic had created the need for mass catering which varied from small kitchen to a large catering of around 25,000 meals per day during peak season.

FLOWCHART OF FLIGHT KITCHEN

Health & Safety

To help maintain high hygiene standards.

They operate a fully equipped food laboratory where they carry out microbiological examination of food, water and ice samples, staff hand swabs, and work surface, equipment and utensil swabs taken from entire production process.

Factors Affecting Hygiene Major factors affecting the hygienic

quality of food are the size of operation , the complexity of in-flight service, the number of airlines catered for, the number of flights serviced during the day and the duration of the flights to be served.

Production planning of flight caterers equates to just in time meaning producing necessary units, in necessary quantities at the necessary time.

Using frozen meals reduces the critical limits within which the bacterial growth may occur.

Flight kitchens normally use a cook-chill system that is blast chilling.

Food storage and preparation of serving takes place in aircraft galleys.

Process Improvement in Flight KitchensWith the external pressures from customers and competitors, it is not surprising thatall flight catering firms are seeking to reduce their costs by operating more efficiently.To do this they have turned to the lessons learned in manufacturing and assemblyplants – most especially the concepts of lean or agile manufacturing and just-in-timeproduction. The approach being adopted varies from firm to firm, and from plant toplant, but some clear trends are evident. These are:• Average cycle time (ie total processing time) in the industry used to be about24 hours – some plants have reduced this to 8 hours• Reducing cycle time has been achieved by taking ‘waste’ out of the system –wasted time, wasted movement, too much stock, unnecessary transportation,and etc.

An industry norm was that each aircraft need 3.5 sets of equipment (one seton the plane, one being cleaned at the point of departure, one ready forloading at the point of arrival, and a half set to cover losses and breakages).By reducing cycle time, global caterers have significantly reduced the totalamount of equipment in the system• Less equipment frees up space in plants to enable revision to processlayouts, simplify inventory control, and generally use space more efficiently• Inventory management is switching to the kanban system, ie standardisedbins of each inventory item• Tray assembly is switching from conveyor belts to work stations based onkanbans• Non-standard catering, such as for special meals, is being outsourced tospecialist suppliers

TIMINGS OF THE MEAL PLAN Breakfast : 6 am to 10 am Snacks : 10 am to 12 noon Lunch : 12 noon to 2:30 pm Tea : 3 pm to 7 pm Dinner : 7 pm to 10:30pm

Normally food is served according to stomach timing of the guest.