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Case study 01Defense · Scheduling systems · Subcontractor

Vennli

A flight scheduling and schedule-management portal delivered under subcontract for a U.S. Air Force program, covering sortie scheduling, crew and aircraft assignment, deconfliction, and routing.

The challenge

Air operations scheduling that spreadsheets could not hold

Flight scheduling is a constraint problem wearing an administrative disguise. A single day's schedule has to reconcile aircraft availability, crew qualification and currency, duty-time limits, range and airspace windows, and maintenance downtime, and every one of those moves independently. Handled in spreadsheets and email, the reconciliation work grows faster than the flying does.

Because the customer was a federal one, accessibility was a delivery requirement rather than a preference. Section 508 governs federal ICT and incorporates WCAG Level AA as its technical standard, which meant conformance had to be designed into the interface rather than remediated after acceptance.

Our approach

Model the domain first, then build the interface over it

We treated scheduling as a domain-modelling problem before it was a UI problem. The Python service owns the rules governing what may be scheduled against what, and why a given assignment is invalid, so the React portal never has to encode operational logic it can drift away from.

01
Domain model for sorties, crews and airframes

An explicit model of the schedulable entities and the relationships between them, so qualification, currency and availability constraints live in one place.

02
Deconfliction and routing logic in Python

Server-side validation that surfaces conflicts as the schedule is built, rather than leaving schedulers to discover them downstream.

03
Operator-facing portal in React and Material UI

A scheduling surface designed around how schedulers actually work: dense views, keyboard-driven editing, and fast iteration on a day's plan.

04
Accessibility enforced in the component layer

Focus management, semantics and contrast handled once in shared components, so every screen inherited conformance instead of being audited into it later.

Outcome

Delivered end to end across a one-year engagement

Rainier built the portal end to end over a twelve-month period of performance, from domain model through the scheduling interface and routing behaviour, working as a subcontractor to Vennli on the program.

Role
Subcontract
delivered under prime contractor
Period
12 months
single continuous engagement
Scope
End to end
domain model through UI

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