By Sophie Foster, deputy travel editor for Mailonline
10:17 May 24, 2024, updated 10:35 May 24, 2024
Budget airline easyJet, which operates 1,950 flights daily during the high season, opened its brand new Integrated Control Center (ICC) this week – and we got a sneak peek behind the doors.
Those inside manage 340 planes and make the big decisions about who should be delayed – and which groups get maximum protection from disruption, such as schoolchildren and easyJet Holiday passengers.
The managers are also putting in place a complex staffing schedule, which they reveal has become more difficult in the wake of Brexit regulations.
Plus we had the chance to try to run an easyJet flight schedule – while a faulty plane put a route out of action. It wasn’t easy.
The new ICC is located just outside the Luton Airport site, so it can continue to operate if an incident occurs, such as last year’s car park fire.
The building has a host of new features, from dark desks to spare the night shift’s eyes, individual lighting, huge displays and… to their delight, windows (the previous office ‘felt like a casino’, says Gill, director of Network control).
The control center is split into two: the Integrated Control Center (ICC) and the Maintenance Control Center (MCC).
The ICC is filled with four ‘pods’ – covering Gatwick, the rest of Britain, the EU and ‘the Swiss’ – plus a senior team occupying a separate desk.
Senior Operations Officer Aaishah is responsible for monitoring every flight landing and take-off, plus any disruptions that occur.
‘Truck drivers are only allowed to drive a certain number of hours, the same applies to flight crews.’ Jen, easyJet senior crew officer
The weather can throw a spanner in the works, but she revealed that easyJet has its own dedicated Met Office scientists on the phone to tell her how long the bad weather will last to help with this.
Aaishah also has to ensure aircraft can reach maintenance hangars on time – even a canceled engine change costs £10,000.
The next step was the crew team, where Senior Crewing Officers Jen and Adam balance the needs of approximately 15,000 crew members.
About 22 percent of all easyJet crews are immediately on standby, waiting to cover for sick or overworked staff.
Legal rest periods are one of the reasons why flights are delayed.
If a voyage is delayed, the crew on board may need an extended rest period before flying again, meaning a new crew will be needed for their next scheduled service.
The team noted that all crew members, from pilots to flight attendants, must live within 90 minutes of the airport to ensure they can reach it in a timely manner.
Jen explained to MailOnline: ‘Truck drivers are only allowed to drive a certain number of hours – the same goes for flight crew.’
Crewing issues have become more complicated in the wake of Brexit, leading to more flight delays.
Post-Brexit, if a flight is registered in the EU, it can only be crewed by EU staff – and easyJet cannot use British standby crew to fill the gaps. If all EU standby crew is used up, the flight will be delayed.
The ICC also includes the customer disruption team.
These are the people who choose which flights are delayed or canceled – and who you fly with can decide whether you get to your destination on time.
A large, complicated screen using a program called ‘disco’ shows what flights are scheduled that day, who is on board and which flights require a new aircraft or new crew.
Mark, Senior Customer Disruption Officer, said certain ‘special interest’ groups will be prioritised, including passengers with reduced mobility, easyJet Holiday groups, repatriated passengers (i.e. people who have already been delayed) and school trips.
The reason the latter is a priority is that school trips often do not have enough adults to accompany the children during the night in a hotel booked by easyJet for those with canceled flights.
Other considerations when deciding to postpone include the number of available hotel rooms and seats to the same destination within the next 48 hours.
New high-tech systems are woven into the new ICC, including an artificial intelligence program designed by easyJet called ‘Jetstream’.
This combines information from eight major manuals into one system, allowing the control room to make faster decisions.
Gill explained, “We’ve fed thousands and thousands of pages from eight different manuals and now we can just ask him a question and an answer comes out.”
Even the crew will be able to use Jetstream to search for answers – instead of flooding the ICC with calls (currently receiving 35,000 crew calls monthly).
The MCC forms the other half of the complex, where 26 certified engineers ensure that every aircraft can fly safely.
Jim, Maintenance Operations Duty Manager – and former Army helicopter engineer – oversees the 24-hour operation.
His workload includes scheduling maintenance hangar appointments in Luton, Gatwick, Berlin, Geneva and Milan and ensuring aircraft spend the night in maintenance every 750 cycles (flight hours).
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The MCC will soon join the ICC in using AI, with a new system that can retrieve past reports and point to ongoing issues.
Jim noted, “We are very highly regulated, ultimately the tool we are going to use will show you the source. It will look at the information around it and use its own learning process. You then use your own knowledge to make a judgement.’
Those of us who went on tour not only got to look behind the scenes, but also took part in a ‘disruption game’.
We were shown a large board showing the schedule for the day: the flights that had departed, the flights scheduled, the aircraft available and when to come in for maintenance or repairs, along with the crew schedules and hours already worked.
The grinning ICC staff then informed us that we were dealing with a scenario: 40 schoolchildren are about to board a flight at Milan Malpensa Airport bound for London Gatwick, but it is discovered that the plane is defective, and a standby EU aircraft ready to replace it has no crew.
Unfortunately there are no EU staff available on standby to man the flight, only British – which is useless after Brexit.
How would you adjust the schedule?
Ultimately, my team rightly decided to defer domestic passengers scheduled to board two flights from Milan to Brindisi and instead use these aircraft and their crews to return priority groups to London.
The crew can then return and work on the delayed flights to Brindisi Airport in southern Italy.
Because the delayed flights are domestic, short flights, the crew has time within legal working hours to staff them so that everyone gets home that evening.
I discovered how quickly delays can add up and be passed on to other pilots when all considerations are taken into account.
Maybe I’ll grumble less now when I see the time change on the departure board.