Airlines, airports and air traffic controllers prepare for chaos. But that doesn’t make responding to it any less complicated.
The global aviation system is deeply interconnected and responding to a disruption — especially one as severe as the power outage at London’s Heathrow Airport, a global hub — is a delicate balancing act. For airlines, moving even a small number of flights can have cascading effects.
Heathrow was closed Friday after a fire at a nearby power substation, leaving tens of thousands of travelers, and dozens of airlines, facing cancellations, rerouted flights and a cascading series of changes to schedules.
“They’re thinking not just in terms of a single day, but recovery,” said Dr. Michael McCormick, a professor of air traffic management at Embry‑Riddle Aeronautical University, who managed the federal airspace over New York during the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. “They have to look at where passengers with bags, aircraft and aircrews need to be tomorrow, the next day, and the next day.”
When crises occur, airline network operation centers go into overdrive. The centers are the nerve centers of carriers — typically large, quiet, secure rooms with power backups and protections against severe weather and disasters.
At large airlines, operations centers are staffed around the clock with teams that monitor the weather, manage planes, communicate with air traffic control, schedule crews and much more.
Small disruptions can be handled surgically — a sick pilot can be replaced or a broken plane swapped out for another. But bigger disruptions like the one at London’s Heathrow Airport can require scrapping and reworking intricate plans while taking into account a wide range of limitations.
Planes differ in how many people they can carry and how far they can fly, so a small plane used for shorter domestic flights cannot easily be swapped in for a larger one used on longer flights. They also must be fueled adequately and their weight balanced appropriately, needs that must be adjusted if planes are rerouted.
Regulations require that pilots and flight attendants are not overworked and are allowed to rest after certain number of hours on the clock. If a flight takes too long to depart, a crew can time out. When schedulers do reassign crews, they also have to take into account where those pilots and flight attendants are needed next, or they could risk more disruptions later.
Airlines, of course, do not operate in isolation. As they change plans, they need to work with airport and air traffic control officials who may have limited resources to accommodate the changes. Airports are limited not just in how many flights they can receive, but also, in some cases, what types of planes they can safely accept. In the United States, for example, many air traffic control towers have long suffered from controller shortages.
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