Mark Murphy, operations director of London Heathrow’s Terminal 5, talks to Felicity Cousins
7am I arrive at T5 between 7am and 8am. I have a conference call to review what happened overnight, and look at the day ahead with the chief operating officer. Then I head to the control room. This is where the team can view the whole airport and security area and spot any problems. One morning a passenger died on a plane. This is not unusual if you think how many people fly [T5 served 24.5 million people last year]. So in this case I had to make sure the situation was okay, as well as ensure the staff who dealt with it were okay.
The early shift manager is in the control room from 4am getting ready for the security rush. The busiest time is the morning, when night flights are arriving and business flights to Europe take off. We serve 130 destinations and British Airways has about 60 aircraft on and around T5. It doesn’t take much to slow the system down.
9am I meet with BA weekly. Its management team is just down the corridor, which adds a certain creative tension but brings us closer together – this helped when we had such a problematic start [when T5 opened]. With situations such as bad weather, it is BAA that decides whether the airport can stay open and then it is up to the airlines whether to fly. A lot of the delays during the recent snow were caused by aircraft having to be de-iced – the pilot has to be 100 per cent happy that everything is working correctly before he takes off.
In other meetings with BA, we talk about our preparations for the 2012 Olympics and what measures the airline should be taking – for example, pole vaulters’ poles need to be accommodated, as well as canoes.
11am We report to the Civil Aviation Authority about everything from security queue delays to a lift not working – there is a penalty if we don’t sort these things out. I also work closely with the UK Border Agency on arrivals. IRIS is being phased out – the new technology is called Advanced Clearing System (ACS) and ACS Plus. ACS is for chip-enabled passports [post-2006] and is free. ACS Plus is for international passengers and this will have an annual fee [details yet to be released]. It will start in T4 in June.
1pm I usually have a meeting over lunch in one of the airside restaurants or a one-to-one with a member of my team. Or I eat in the staff canteen.
2pm I try to spend some time each day walking around the terminal, but this can be difficult, being so busy. I work closely with airfield and baggage directors and we meet weekly. With T2 closing and T5 opening, a lot of the job has been managing airline moves. The T5C satellite building will open in the first quarter of next year and will be able to accommodate the A380.
4pm A lot of what I do is risk management. We survey customers monthly to see where we are succeeding and where we fail. I talk to my team about security in the terminal – the issue is always whether to have all 20 machines open at one time. We can’t predict exactly when people will arrive or when planes will be delayed. We are also trialling larger trays to hold all a person’s belongings to reduce the amount of X-rays. Security is our core business so we have to find a way to make it work with customer service. The best we can do is make the process quick and painless, and be polite and explain why things are happening.
7pm My day finishes at about this time, but it really depends on what is happening. With operational jobs, your phone is never off – during the snow we worked around the clock and everyone got stuck in. I was new to aviation when I joined [Murphy has been with BAA for seven years, first at London Stansted and then moving to T5 just after it opened – before that he was with Tesco] and there is a buzz about both a supermarket and an airport – they are very energetic places. You have to love the unpredictability but as an operations director you need to keep this to a minimum.
My team are all experts. You have to be able to respond well to a crisis, and the nature of terrorist attacks mean we are constantly looking at security. You need to be able to pick yourself up and dust yourself off. You should also be obsessed with improving passenger satisfaction.
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