This is about as close as you can get to the bridge of Starship Enterprise and still be on Planet Earth. It’s Southwest Airlines’ new Network Operations Control center in Dallas, a 48,600 square foot, high-tech habitation bathed in soothing blue light.
Under that light as many as 256 men and women at a time can sit or stand in front of computer screens, monitoring the workings of the United States’ largest domestic airline, a carrier that launches some 3,600 flights daily.
Capable of withstanding a hit by a 165-mile-per-hour F-3 tornado, the hardened facility gathers under one acoustically-tuned roof (designed to control noise) all the diverse disciplines necessary to run the airline – on good days as well as bad.
This AirlineRatings.com reporter was among the first to visit the new center, to see the difference in safety, efficiency and speed a well-thought-out physical facility can make. Here’s the essential theory: bring all the key players to one place so they can readily communicate. Do that and they will make better decisions, decisions that directly affect passenger’s lives.
Hate rough weather? The decisions hammered out in the NOC could ease your ride. Has a mechanical issue delayed the first leg of your journey and you’re not sure you’ll be able to make that critical connection to the second leg of the trip? The solutions they come up in the NOC may save the day.
The new NOC replaces a significantly-smaller Operations Coordination Center. “We had a small facility,” says Mike Miller, Network Operations Control’s senior director. There was scant room to grow. “We did not have the floor space to have [all the requisite players] in close proximity, working as a team to solve an individual problem.”
Now, flight dispatchers (more on them later) maintenance, both pilot and flight attendant scheduling, air traffic control specialists, meteorologists, chief pilots and customer service coordinators rub elbows all the time – this as they scan an array of forty-four 80-inch overhead screens that take situational awareness to new heights.
Speed skills
“The pace of an airline moves at such speed,” says Miller, “especially during irregular operations (such as bad weather) that those disciplines have to be available. They have to be nearby.”
Immediate proximity to the right person counts in the airline operational arena. It can make the difference between making your connection and being stranded.
Let’s say there’s wretched weather at Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall, a major airport in Southwest’s scheme of things. Lightening wreaths the field, preventing flights from landing. If it happens on a busy Friday afternoon when everyone’s trying to get home all hell can break loose. This is what Miller means by “irregular operations.”
Informed by ‘met’ (meteorologists) that the situation could last an hour or so, dispatchers – who share responsibility with an aircraft’s pilot-in-command for the planning, initiation, monitoring and completion of a given flight – huddle with crew scheduling to choreograph critical changes. “It could be a crew changing from one aircraft to another,” says Miller. One element driving the decision is “finding crews that have additional duty time [left] in their day.” To prevent fatigue, newly-stringent U.S. Federal Aviation Administration rules spell out how many hours a crew can be on duty.
Customer service representatives are an important part of the mix in the NOC too. “Say you have a maintenance issue,” says Steve Christl, a Southwest pilot who directs NOC training, compliance and safety. While the airline is working on getting a spare airplane to the gate, a NOC customer service rep is proactively looking at mitigating missed connections, rebooking customers and getting the word out to them fast.
Here’s where it gets tricky. It’s not just the passengers who get on the plane at, say, Houston Hobby who could be inconvenienced, it’s the people waiting to board that same Boeing 737-700 in Nashville who are bound for Chicago Midway, the flight’s ultimate destination. “Downline customer connections are going to be jeopardized later in the day,” says Christl, “at seven or eight o’clock at night.” That might be the last flight out that day headed for Midway. You don’t want to have a bunch of unhappy passengers staying overnight waiting for the first flight out the next day.
That’s where dispatch, crew scheduling, customer service and dispatch work together to come up with a plan. Precisely because of their proximity to one another they can work the problem collaboratively and come up with a fix far faster than in the NOC than they could at the old Operations Coordination Center. Since the new control facility’s opening “We’ve had situations,” says Christl, “where all that [collaboration] has taken place in about five minutes.”
The NOC has a way of compressing time, producing a finer-grained species of situational awareness, of making ‘look-ahead’ decisions more likely to work right. “With the name change to Network Operations Control, we’re really taking more control than we ever have before,” says Christl. As the NOC is equipped with even more new technology, he says it’s going to result in more proactive decision-making. “We want to be pushing out information to the [individual airport] stations on exactly what’s going to occur. Because we [want to look] three or four hours further [ahead] than we are now.”
Nothing perturbs passengers more than being left in the dark when it comes to delays or cancellations. The aim should be for carriers to tell their customers in a truthful, timely fashion, “‘Yes, you’re going to make your connections,’ or ‘No, you aren’t,’” says Dave Wotton, the NOC’s chief of dispatch. He says the biggest complaint he’s heard from passengers during his career is, “’[the airline] didn’t make any announcements. They didn’t tell me what was going on.’’ His philosophy is straightforward: “I’d much rather get the bad news and know what’s going on than wondering what’s going on.”
To that end he says Southwest is looking at the idea of adding yet another discipline to NOC: social media. Once-upon-a-time, a few short years ago, as long as passengers found out within fifteen minutes or so what was going on with their flight that was acceptable. They may not like the answer, but at least they knew. “Now,” says Wotton, “with the advent of social media as soon as a problem occurs you can look on Twitter or Facebook and see what the customer is already talking about.”
The implication isn’t lost on Southwest Airlines. Whoever is fastest to know, first to respond can more easily “set the narrative,” says Wotton. “If we can get the facts [out first], then the story I think you see on Facebook and Twitter changes dramatically.” He asserts, “We’re much better off if we can set the narrative.” Far too often, he believes its “the folks who don’t know [the facts]” that actually set the story line.
That’s why Southwest is exploring the idea of bringing a social media people into the Network Operations Control, so the airline can react to the problem, the “irregular operation,” and post the message on social media.
Safety first
Speed, convenience, connections – all bow before alter of safety. That’s the controlling factor. And while NOC decision-makers can’t control Mother Nature, they can control the airline’s response to her wrath. Southwest has “always had meteorologists that were either nearby, tucked away or available on the floor,” says NOC Senior Director Mike Miller. Now, the ‘met’ guys are up on the bridge, an elevated area raised above the rest of the floor. This is the command deck of Starship Enterprise.
That positioning means decision-makers have immediate access to their insights. “Whenever you have a severe line of thunderstorms going through you always want to know where the hail is, where the strong front-line winds [are], or whether there’s tornadic activity.”
Often working in tandem with meteorology are some of he carrier’s chief pilots. They too are on the bridge. “When there’s turbulence en route,” says Miller, “you want to make sure we’re being safe – not just buckling in our customers, but [that] our cabin crews are secure when flying into those bumpy areas.”
It’s the “bumpy areas” of running one of the world’s biggest carriers that Southwest’s Network Operations Control seeks to smooth. Under its roof new technology and face-to-face communication marry. The offspring, contend the people who run the NOC, is a safer, more efficient more responsive airline.
