Jenny Southan finds out what goes on inside Easyjet’s nerve centre at Luton
It’s 0930 on a Monday and I’m in the War Room. “Saturday we had 1,396 sectors and 203,000 passengers. The only issue was the weather in Funchal – it did cause us problems. Winds were gusting beyond limits throughout the day. We also had the first of a two-day Spanish air traffic control strike. Fiumicino-Nice, bags required re-screening after being left unattended at the aircraft and that led to 166 minutes of delay. That was an avoidable delay.”
Easyjet’s daily operations meeting is taking place at its Luton airport HQ – Hangar 89, which is decked out in the airline’s trademark orange – and the team is taking it in turns to report on the carrier’s performance over the weekend.
Colleagues from other departments are also calling in – customer operations give an update on social media engagement. “Yesterday wasn’t too busy, at 819 interactions, predominantly dealing with queues.”
The facility has been the low-cost airline’s headquarters since it was founded in 1995, and is home to crew and support teams. I’m here to learn how far the airline goes to solve the daily challenges it faces – be it slot delays, technical faults or passengers needing to be offloaded.
These are not jobs for people who respond to stress with anything but a calm smile and clear mind.
The operations control centre is a large open-plan office with an audible buzz and dozens of computer terminals displaying scary-looking spreadsheets. It houses the operations, crewing, flight planning and maintenance teams, all of which work 12-hour shifts.
“Generally the way we know how many people are in the office is if I go and get ice creams for everyone – if you get 65 then you are never short,” says Hugh McConnellogue, maintenance operations head.
Luton is the only operations base for Easyjet, which serves 138 airports in 32 countries.
McConnellogue says: “When the flying stops, the maintenance starts. In the day, the workload for the ops team really ramps up because they are responsible for managing the departure and arrival of every flight, so if there are any delays building in the network, they look at what options we have and improve the turnaround later. If everything was perfect, there would be nothing for us to do.”
At the start of the day there are meetings to work out the “game plan”, he says.
“There is this balance between making a plan, initiating it and then dealing with the day. The most unpredictable things are thunderstorms and lightning. If it becomes localised within 25 miles of an airfield, it is likely it will have to be closed.”
Air traffic control strikes are also challenging. “The French are pretty good because they will say: ‘You have to take out 40 per cent of your programme.’ But if you look at, say, Italy, they leave it to you to decide how many flights to cancel,” he says.
“There is also the chance the strike could be called off, but once a flight is cancelled you won’t get the customers back.”
The toughest period the operations team ever endured was during the eruption of Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajokull five years ago.
“I don’t think anything will ever surpass that,” McConnellogue says. “We had a management training event that evening and someone said they were closing the airspace. I remember saying: ‘You have got something wrong, they wouldn’t do that.’ But sure enough, they did, and we couldn’t get our heads around it.
“For one thing, we thought putting the entire European fleet on the ground [would be impossible], there wouldn’t be enough places to park it. It went on for the best part of two weeks – it was a real battle. And, of course, we had to get it all moving again, with crew in all the wrong places.”
He hopes that with Easyjet’s ash-detecting AVOID technology, he will never see this happen again.
What’s the secret to dealing with the pressures of the job? “You have to keep focused, plan for what you can plan for but don’t get stressed about what you can’t,” McConnellogue says. “If you try to take control of things that you don’t know the outcome of, you can end up making some pretty bad errors.”
On the other side of the room, phones are ringing. “Easyjet, Sarah speaking. How can I help? What’s the reference number? Echo, Papa, Seven, Kilo, Hotel, X-ray, Quebec? Okay. Bear with me.”
Airport liaison officers are responsible for managing delays and cancellations, updating Easyjet’s Flight Tracker, which passengers can see via an app, and communicating with captains, ground crew and government departments such as immigration and border force.
One officer, Mark, tells me: “We will get phone calls about abusive passengers and we will go in and cancel their bookings, file a security report and let the airports know why they have been refused for the return journey. We deal with medical organs being transported and baggage policies. People turn up with the most bizarre things – we’ve had live animals, a quad bike, even a motorcycle engine.”
Once, he says, he had a message from a pilot to say a passenger was worried he’d left the gas on at home and the police had to break his door down.
On Mark’s screen, we watch an Easyjet aircraft gradually trace a path towards Madeira’s coast, where it is going to attempt a tricky landing by cliffs in bad weather.
He says: “In Funchal we had a flight that was delayed overnight from Lisbon because of the wind so they diverted back and put all the passengers in a hotel. The flight has gone again this morning but it looks like the same problem. Rather than going straight back to Lisbon we could divert to Porto Santo, where people can get off and take a ferry, otherwise we will take them back to Lisbon.”
The aircraft, it turns out, lands safely. Gill Lucas, Easyjet’s disruption manager, tells me: “With 1,500 flights a day and up to 250,000 passengers, you are always going to have some form of disruption and people accept that, but they want to be kept updated. With the French ATC strikes we had to cancel about 600 flights, but this was before they got to the airport.” Lucas took it upon herself to broadcast live reports throughout the day on streaming platform Periscope.
“Sometimes people can be delayed ten minutes and the vile messages we get on Twitter can be really nasty,” she says. “The best part of my job is when you get thank yous – when you are working hard and you realise people do appreciate it.”
