Build Vehicles & Assign Crew

Once a deployment exists, the next step is putting vehicles on it and filling their crew seats. This guide covers both.

Prerequisites

Organisation admin, region admin, district admin, or group admin role to manage vehicles and crew on any vehicle.
A brigade admin has a narrower set of rights, limited to their own unit’s vehicles — see Cross-Unit Crewing below.

Two Ways to Add a Vehicle

On a deployment’s page you’ll see two small forms (managers only):

Request Vehicle

Use this when you know the type of vehicle you need but not which specific one yet — for example, “we need two tankers, we’ll figure out which brigade supplies them later.”

Choose a Vehicle Type
Set the Qty (quantity)
Click Add Request

This creates one or more dashed, amber/grey “Unfilled” placeholder cards showing that vehicle type, Awaiting vehicle assignment. Anyone with manage rights can later assign an actual vehicle into an unfilled slot (see below), or set/change its type if it was added blank (“Any Type”).

Add Vehicle

Use this when you already know exactly which vehicle you want on the deployment.

Under Add Vehicle, choose a vehicle from Select Vehicle — the list includes every in-service vehicle across your unit and its descendants that isn’t already on the deployment
Click Add Vehicle

The vehicle is added immediately, along with a full set of crew seats generated from its crew capacity (see below). If the vehicle happened to match an outstanding vehicle-type request, that request is automatically marked fulfilled.

Fill an Unfilled Vehicle Slot

For a dashed “Unfilled” vehicle-type card:

If the slot doesn’t have a type yet (“Any Type”), choose one from the Set vehicle type… dropdown and click Set Type
Choose a specific vehicle from Select vehicle… and click Assign
Click Clear slot to remove the type (keeping the empty request), or Remove slot to delete the request entirely

The Lead Vehicle

If your organisation has a Lead Vehicle Type configured (see Set the Lead Vehicle Type), the lead vehicle’s card — whether filled or still an unfilled slot — is highlighted with an amber LEAD VEHICLE banner and border, making it easy to spot at a glance.

Crew Seats

When a vehicle is added, StationOne automatically creates one crew seat per position of the vehicle’s crew capacity:

Seat 1 is always the Driver and requires a driving endorsement for that vehicle
Seat 2 is the Crew Leader
Remaining seats are plain Crew

A manager can give any non-Driver, non-Crew-Leader seat a custom label (e.g. “Observer”, “Chainsaw Operator”) and attach required qualifications — both shown as small badges under the seat’s role.

Assign a Member to a Seat

Click Assign next to any seat. A picker opens showing eligible candidates:

Available — members who are marked available for the deployment’s date/shift (see Member & Vehicle Availability for Crew Builder), and who meet the seat’s requirements
Show N unavailable / not set (override) — a collapsed section listing everyone else who’s still eligible but not marked available, or hasn’t set their availability. Click to expand it.

Every eligible member remains clickable regardless of their availability status — StationOne never blocks an assignment on availability, it only tells you what it knows. Click a name to assign them.

Eligibility itself is filtered:

Driver seats only list members holding a driving endorsement for that specific vehicle
Seats with required qualifications only list members who currently hold every one of them

Change or Clear a Seat

Click Change next to an assigned member to reopen the picker and pick someone else
Clearing a seat (assigning nobody) removes the member and resets the seat to unassigned

Reassigning or clearing an already-approved seat resets it to Pending — a fresh approval is always required after a change, it’s never carried over from a previous assignment. See Approve or Reject Crew Assignments.

Cross-Unit Crewing

A deployment often pulls vehicles and members from units other than the one organising it. A brigade admin (a leaf unit, not a managing role) can:

Assign or clear crew only on their own unit’s vehicles on the deployment
Only while the deployment is still in Draft

They cannot request vehicles, add vehicles, or touch another unit’s vehicle slots. Once a manager assigns one of the brigade’s members to a seat (on any vehicle), that assignment needs the brigade’s approval — see Approve or Reject Crew Assignments for that side of the workflow.

Remove a Vehicle

Click Remove on a vehicle’s card header to take it off the deployment entirely (its crew seats go with it). You’ll be asked to confirm. If the vehicle was filling a type request, that request becomes unfulfilled again.

Common Issues

A driver isn’t showing up as an eligible candidate

Check they hold a current driving endorsement for that specific vehicle — endorsements are per-vehicle, not per-appliance-type. See Add Vehicle Endorsements.

No members appear in the “Available” list at all

Nobody has set their availability for that date yet, or the Availability module isn’t enabled for the unit — expand Show unavailable / not set (override) to assign anyway. See Member & Vehicle Availability for Crew Builder.

A vehicle I need isn’t in the “Select Vehicle” list

Only in-service vehicles (not decommissioned or currently out of service) from your unit and its descendants are offered, and a vehicle already on the deployment won’t be listed twice. A vehicle is also left out if its unit has marked it not available for deployments, or has committed it to a local response crew over the deployment’s period. See Pre-Plan Standby Crews.

A vehicle came in already crewed

If the vehicle’s unit had set up a deployment crew for it ahead of time, that crew is copied into the vehicle’s seats, already approved. Anyone who is no longer eligible (for example archived, or already on another deployment) is left out and their seat stays empty for you to fill. See Pre-Plan Standby Crews.