How airline chaos shone a light on critical operating staff

In a modest office building on the outskirts of Luton airport, a team of 30 people work in near silence to keep easyJet’s operations moving.

The casually dressed and often strikingly young staff are responsible for managing more than 1,000 daily flights across Europe, including co-ordinating aircraft, crew and communication with customers round the clock. 

With voices low and lights dimmed, it is a calm setting for people who have been on the front line of handling the disruption that has gripped the aviation industry this year. 

“It is an incredibly complex ecosystem and there are lots of things that come at you, some of which are completely beyond your control,” said David Morgan, easyJet’s interim chief operations officer.

Chief operating officers at airlines and their staff normally have a low-profile job, overseeing complex logistics and handling the everyday problems that hit schedules, from strikes to snowstorms.

But the role has become one of the most pressured in corporate Europe this year, as millions of passengers travelling on nearly every airline have faced delays and cancellations because of chronic staff shortages across the aviation network, leaving executives fighting a daily battle just to keep passengers moving.

Just under 4,100 flights from UK airports were cancelled in the last week of June as the industry buckled under the weight of returning passengers, according to industry data company OAG. 

Passengers complained of ruined holidays, hours long queues and mountains of lost luggage as companies struggled to cope.

Reliability quickly improved as new staff started work, airports brought in passenger caps and airlines cut down their schedules. Between 0.5 and 1 per cent of flights were cancelled in August.

In Luton, the most striking part of the operation is that the team deals with disruption manually as it occurs. There is no algorithm to change staff rosters to replace people who have worked beyond their hours, or to suggest switching aircraft when things slip out of place. 

If a new crew or a new plane are needed then the operations team have to rework rosters and plan how to move aircraft around themselves. They joke how it is similar to a particularly intense game of Tetris or a jigsaw puzzle. 

“If you are an operational person you need to be somebody who thrives on adrenaline and likes a problem being chucked at them that needs solving,” said Peter Lynam, a former head of flight operations at British Airways.

“It is a hugely complex job . . . operations is effectively a ball juggling exercise and there is no doubt a few balls were dropped this summer,” he added. 

As the disruption overshadowed the rapid recovery from the pandemic, airlines made leadership changes. British Airways boss Sean Doyle split the chief operations officer’s job into two as part of a string of senior management changes in May and hired René de Groot from Dutch airline KLM to take responsibility for day-to day operations. 

At easyJet, aviation veteran Peter Bellew resigned as COO in July and was replaced on an interim basis by Morgan, a serving pilot and director of flight operations. 

James Parker, an aviation headhunter at Venari Partners, said he expected the “large number of senior operational changes” to continue in 2023, with senior maintenance, flight operations and fleet strategists in demand. 

Morgan said this year had been particularly difficult because the industry had not been able to prepare for the return of passengers. While airlines and airports should have been planning for the summer at the start of the year, they were instead faced with new travel rules because of the Omicron coronavirus variant. 

He said airlines were “much better prepared” for next year, including understanding the weaknesses in their operation, notably staffing levels where recruitment for 2023 has begun.

Morgan hosts a call to discuss immediate operational issues at 8.30am seven days a week — except when he is flying — but said his job was focused on longer-term planning including staffing levels and managing relationships with the web of third-party contractors who are employed by airlines. 

“What we’re trying to do is look far enough ahead strategically to try and see what are the things that are going to catch us out,” he said. 

COOs sit on airlines’ management boards and report directly to chief executives. At European airlines they are typically paid about £1mn a year including bonuses, according to industry executives.

The core responsibility is to make sure every flight in an airline’s schedule has a plane, fuel, crew, slot and catering assigned to it. 

When airlines increase their operations for the summer, the scale of the logistics can be daunting. There were 30,730 flights in Europe in the last week of August, according to Eurocontrol.

Nate Bennett, a professor at the J Mack Robinson College of Business at Georgia State University, said the nature of a COO’s responsibilities varied between industries. 

In the case of airlines and other “heavily operational” sectors, “the role typically is very much focused on just that — operations,” he said.

The “relative value” and pay of operational executives at airlines had increased compared with similar commercial roles over the past 25 years, said Lynam, who left BA in 2015 to move into consultancy.

But it can still be a thankless task.

“If you are head of sales you start off the year with not a single seat sold and every action you take is a positive. For an ops person it is almost the other way round, start off with a perfect plan and then you muck it up,” said Lynam.