Bloody hard

Greg Russell has just entered the fifth year of his term as head of Australia’s air traffic management (ATM) and aviation rescue and firefighting (ARFF) provider, steering the organisation through tumultuous times. Little wonder he has described running Airservices Australia as “bloody hard”. Only in May this year did Airservices and the union (Civil Air) representing its air traffic controllers conclude a tortuous and poisonous near 18 month long collective agreement negotiation process that nearly brought the nation’s airline system to a standstill back in February when controllers overwhelmingly voted in favour of industrial action.

Then there were broader workforce issues of an ageing staff demographic that if unchecked would leave Airservices short of critical personnel in the near to medium term, a rundown asset base from 1960s vintage control towers to ageing fire trucks, the complexities of introducing new technologies such as ADS-B, GBAS and RNP, and a “dysfunctional” organisational structure marked by ‘silos’ with separate profit and loss lines and the distracting pursuit of third party work overseas.

“That fundamental dysfunction,” Russell related in a recent interview with Australian Aviation, “was just the first major set of hurdles we needed to overcome. Hence the restructuring of the organisation and a change in the business model.” That included, said Russell scrapping the separate business units with their own P&Ls, a focus on working together across the organisation, better internal information systems, improved HR processes and centralising activities and policies that in the past had differed across the country.

Now, more than four years into his time as Airservices CEO, Russell notes that real change was now apparent, despite the difficult journey so far.

“People have come in and out of this business over the years and say ‘I’ve been out for five years and nothing much has changed’. Well, they won’t be able to say that about Airservices by the time I’ve finished – I can tell you that.”

That change is manifesting in three areas, “people, assets, services” which Russell describes as Airservices’s strategy in three words, which are being addressed by guidance from a series of five year plans. Five years plans sound awfully dry, but they do set out public markers against which the organisation’s progress and reform can be held to account against, and give the organisation a much clearer sense of direction.

“Initially, when I first arrived the idea of getting a hold of the corporate plan and working the plan was some time away,” Russell recalled. “Basically we were dealing with a whole bunch of issues that needed some urgent attention, structure and fundamentally getting control, and now with those systems in place, and I might say a pretty good management team now as well, that we’re now getting to the next stages of maturity in this place.”

The five year overall corporate plan, which is updated annually, is now supported by five year workforce and air traffic management services plans, then there are planning documents for asset management, ARFF services and so forth.

“I think it’s more efficient, I think it’s better focused on the stake holder and customer environment that we operate in and it’s not perfect but we’re getting there,” Russell said of change within Airservices.

It’s on the people front where change has been the most dramatic and problematic, but equally where some of the biggest changes are now manifesting.

“We’ve started to tackle a whole lot of issues,” Russell noted. “If you don’t have proper workforce planning, how do you know who to recruit? How do you know who to train? How do you measure the success of various parts of that chain? How do the new people that you’re bringing into the place, how long do they stay, do they find it a tough environment, are they welcomed, are there proper induction programs, all of that chain has been unmercifully looked at.”

In recent times Airservices has put much effort into the training of its 3300 staff, developing its ‘Learning Academy’ adjacent at Melbourne Airport, introducing a technical training program with the Riverina Institute of TAFE in Wagga Wagga, developing a major firefighting training facility in conjunction with the Victorian CFA at Fiskville west of Melbourne, and developing a senior leadership management program with Mt Eliza Business School.

But none of that averted its most critical workforce issue, which was the crippling collective agreement pay negotiations with Civil Air, which represents Airservices’s 900 strong controller body. It has been a well documented debate that Civil Air has long argued that Airservices is understaffed with air traffic controllers, with an institutionalised culture of relying on overtime to paper over the gaps. But Airservices’s argument has been that while there has been some controller shortages, it has significantly ramped up its training and recruitment programs to meet its controller workforce needs, and that the bigger issue was not the number of controllers, but how they were employed.

The collective agreement process was “very difficult and acrimonious”, Russell recalled. It apparently took the intervention of Infrastructure and Transport Minister Anthony Albanese to avert the disaster of industrial action by the controllers, but all through that period of negotiation there was evidently an informal ‘sick out’ campaign by some controllers that periodically left Airservices short staffed, resulting in certain sectors of en route upper airspace periodically being without air traffic control services, where TIBA procedures had to be put in place.

“The issues that are driving this are sometimes not necessarily about dollars they are about how people are engaged with the organisation, do they feel they are listened to, particularly during a period of change,” said Russell.

How it got to the point of controllers voting for industrial action and a ministerial invention, Russell said, was “largely driven by the change of program that we have put in place. That started back in 2006 in particular in the air traffic group; we’ve had in the past modern technology but with antiquated work practices and if we’re going to achieve the efficiency that I know this organisation can achieve, we’ve got to put those two in sync.

“The way the sectors are organised, with 32 of them are across Australia, goes back to the 1960s and we’ve got airspace divided by state boundaries or the River Murray for goodness sakes – how relevant is that in this day and age? And on top of that what we’ve allowed to grow a series of endorsements, depending on which sector you are in, so we’ve built a system fundamentally to fail at the first significant hurdle. I can have a room full of people but without the right person in the right sector with the right endorsement, at the moment this is where the system is dreadfully vulnerable.”

That dreadful vulnerability has certainly left airlines fuming on occassion, even after the collective agreement process has been settled. On September 13 three Sydney Airport controllers called in sick, causing huge disruptions flight cancellations. Following the stranding of 360 Virgin Blue passengers the airline’s CEO Brett Godfrey publicly lambasted Airservices for its lack of contingency planning.

“We’re an airline. We don’t cancel flights because a pilot doesn’t show up,” Godfrey said. “They do get sick, we know everyone gets sick, but we pay a lot of money to have reserves.”

Then last year, during the height of the TIBA issue, Virgin Blue publicly demanded $500,000 in compensation from Airservices for the costs of service disruptions.

But, Russell told AA, “Brett didn’t understand the full extent of the issue that we are dealing with, we’ve had some discussion with Virgin since that time because it’s important that they do understand this issue and again you can’t fix it over night but there is a definite program of improvement in this area.”

That change program is seeing Airservices recategorise airspace into three areas – East Coast Services covering the climb, en route and descent phases for high capacity RPT flights in the corridor from Adelaide to Cairns; Regional Services covering airspace used by lower capacity RPT and GA operations over continental Australia, and Upper Air Services for long haul high capacity RPT flights – which is being rolled out of a period of 18 months.

“But in order to do it you need to build up the people, there is lots of cross training and you need to look carefully at your requirements, what do you actually need to run this organisation vis-a-vis the volume of traffic at particular hours of the day and particular parts of the country, and that is a significant piece of work.”

Rostering is another issues. “We (previously) had 32 rostering committees, that’s been brought down to a centralised rostering cell based in Canberra with some new software which we’ve bought which will produce a master roster and keep a much better handle on that area. Anyone who’s worked in 24 hour operations knows how important rostering is and that was a major issue in the discussions in the union during this last certified agreement.”

Then there is the absenteeism problem. “By any standard our absenteeism has been allowed to grow to a point of being out of control and it doesn’t matter how many extra people that pour into the bucket – we’ve got 121 trainees now and we’ve ramped up the numbers coming into our learning academy in the next little while – if they are not well deployed and well organised, and there are holes in the bucket in terms of excessive use of sick leave, I’m never going to be able to resolve this issue, so we’ve got to work on all of those things at the same time.”

Russell said the issue of controller sick leave is “plateauing”, noting the new certified agreement “gives us better intervention points in terms of being able to review the sick leave and other leave of individual air traffic controllers, and that’s long overdue and I think over a period of time we’re going to change this, well I’m determined we’re going to change it. I get accused of there being staff shortages by the union, (but) I’ve never regarded that as being an immediate issue, it’s how we are deployed that’s the problem, if I do nothing in terms of training people and growing and training activity over the next few years I will have a staff shortage, absolutely, because there are people who are retiring, but there’s enormous scale for us to improve the efficiency and productivity of the delivery of air traffic services.”

Still, while the new certified agreement is now in place, it is evident that relations with the union will take some time to heal.

Civil Air executive secretary Peter McGuane said following the September Sydney Airport disruptions that, “Airservices should ’fess up – it’s losing more staff than it’s recruiting, it’s struggling to recruit people of the right calibre for the job, and the staff at the training academy can’t cope with the intakes and the high failure rates.”

Overall, though, Russell points to a recent staff engagement survey which shows that engagement (a measure of employee satisfaction with their employer) is improving, but does concede there are particular issues at Sydney.

“I’ve always believed in making sure we knew what was happening within our staff,” said Russell. “We’ve had Roy Morgan now do three staff surveys, we do them around August each year, and this year it was in a lot more detail, in terms of not just high level issues but down to management level issues so we can identify where particular problem areas are, and clearly the air traffic control group has always stood out in terms of not being part of the mainstream with respect to where the general trend of staff engagement was going. There is an engagement index built around a number if indices, and when I arrived it was around 32 per cent and fell to 29 the first year I was here and then it’s been climbing every since across the organisation. We improved last year from an engagement number of 53 to 55, by Australian standards that’s pretty good, that’s what Morgan’s tell me.

“I get accused of there being staff shortages by the union, (but) I’ve never regarded that as being an immediate issue, it’s how we are deployed that’s the problem.”

“It’s not to say there aren’t pockets of areas where there are some issues, for instance in our Sydney air traffic area, the results aren’t good, but that’s something we are now going to work on in more detail.”

Russell says career development and training is another key priority for Airservices, which will increase the satisfaction levels of the controller workforce, while at the same time giving the organisation greater operational flexibility.

“When I first arrived, I sat down in the Brisbane Centre plugged in with an air traffic controller listening to what he was doing and during the breaks I said to him, ‘tell me about yourself and how long have you been here?’ and the answer came back ‘25 years’ and I asked ‘well, what do you do from here?’ and we’re sitting amongst all the screens in Brisbane Centre and he said ‘well if I don’t basically stuff this up I get the chance to move from this screen here to that one over there’. Now that is just soul destroying.

“It’s taken us quite some time but this career development issue within our air traffic controllers, and generally across the organisation – you’ve got to give people interesting work to do. This organisation in the past has been reasonably good in giving a lot of our technical people great experience all round the country and overseas, I think we need to focus that experience very definitely on our air traffic control group, and I think the fact these guys have been stuck in front of these screens without change for a long period of their careers is part of the angst that is in the organisation and we’re moving to reduce that significantly over the next couple of years.”

As Civil Air’s McGuane’s comments reflect, it looks like it will take some time before that angst is fully overcome. But, said Russell, “My sense is there is a way through this. We’re talking to the unions more carefully and in a more constructive way about what it is we’re are trying to do and where the benefits are quite frankly.”

And Airservices CEO Russell is certainly adamant that the experience of last year and early this year won’t be repeated again. “I don’t believe that its acceptable for us to go through a period that we went through in the last 18 months every three years, I just don’t think it is, it dislocates the business and it creates significant angst with our customers and we’ve got to find another way to do it.”

Interestingly, Russell reflected that, “In the end we went through 18 months of difficulty for a wage outcome that wasn’t that far off the mark. All that pain for a per cent or so, it just doesn’t seem to add up in my mind, and I’m more convinced that it wasn’t just money, it was the issue of how people were treated and respected, and career development and those sorts of things underlying a lot of this.

“There is a genuine attempt now from the management and myself to see if we can take the union together with us on this reform journey for instance, I would hope that cooler heads can see that if we are able to bring about this reform then it’s going to unlock a lot of the issues at the heart of a lot of the angst in the place over the years and I’m keen to try.”

Certainly Russell says he has enjoyed the full support of not just the Airservices board but of Minister Albanese during these testing times.
“I was very grateful for the support of the minister, it was critical,” said Russell. “He was supportive right through the process and that was really helpful.”

As for the Airservices board, “Government organisations often don’t get that board issue right, and at a critical time in Airservices’s history, they did and that’s allowed us to do what we have done.”

One suspects too that the airlines, for all there public hand-wringing about service disruption issues, would be quietly supportive of if not the methods, certainly the aims of the Airservices program of reform too. Certainly few would doubt Russell’s determination in taking on the challenging job of reforming a government owned provide of monopoly services.

“A lot of it goes to the fact that this is a long term infrastructure business, things you do today and things I’m doing today I won’t see (come to fruition) while I’m working in this place and I know that, but that’s not a reason not to do them, because you’ve got to put yourself into the mindset of what’s good for the organisation and some of the things that we are doing now, frankly and personally I say to myself some day, why am I doing them? Well the organisation’s going to be better placed (for it) and I’m mindful of the fact that we serve in a quiet way for many Australians who don’t know what we do, in a quiet way we serve their interests all day every day.”

Infrastructure has been another key challenge for Airservices, if less controversial.

“Last year we conducted a review of all of our assets, every single one of them, and we showed the results to our board, and to say the least there was shock in the room,” Rusell recalled. “What had happened is over a period of time the asset base has been allowed to run down without proper asset cycle management and of course a capital program. Now we’re well and truly into it an ambitious five year capital program that’s going to amount to $800 million plus, and beyond that there could be more of it. The assets were in such a state that in order to ensure the safety and reliability of our systems we simply had to do something about it.”

Indeed two-thirds of the $800 million spend is being spent on replacing existing essential assets like control towers, fire stations, fire trucks, radars, communications and surveillance equipment.

“In the early part of the decade we were not spending even at a rate that would replace the depreciation on that asset base, $20-30 million a year, in a organisation like this where there is $650-700 million asset base, you’re not even keeping your head above water. So we’ve had to go back and bring discipline into the process, not have people darting off everywhere with projects, we’ve had the bring proper planning into place, and we’ve then had to develop a skills base to be able to deliver these projects. That’s been painful, there is no two ways about it, when you lose that and you spend that little amount of capital you lose the capability to be able to project manage.”

Russell said the Airservices board is very focused on delivery. “I think that in the past the organisation has been rightly accused of over promising and under delivery and that’s something I’m determined we are going to fix,” he said.

“Having gone through the pain of all this over the last couple of years we are at least now starting to see some of the results, the TINR (telecommunications infrastructure network replacement) project, the digital communications backbone that we have had to rebuild around the whole country involving multiple sites and multiple pieces of equipment. All of that will be finished before Christmas. That then allows us service delivery opportunities with respect to ADS-B in upper airspace. This has been coming a long, long time but its literally within sight of being achieved. Our VHF upgrades will be part of that, with ADS-B we’ll be able to move at last, leaving this whole question of user preferred routes and what have you, and that’s something the industry has been waiting for a long time. Well it’s in sight of the delivery.

“We’ve put work into our towers,” Russell continued. “I described it when I first went into them it was like walking into a museum, it was ’50s and ’60s level of technology – we have the largest collect of horn telephones in Australia, I think we buy them off eBay and that’s just ridiculous.”

The new tower program began three years ago, and Airservices is about to put out to tender the construction of new towers at Melbourne and Adelaide airports, with a tender for Rockhampton to follow

“There was a huge amount of work involved in getting that right,” said Russell. Those towers, plus the existing towers will be fitted with a new “tower technology package that we’ve bought from Sensis and Nav Canada, which is screen based and will remove the use of strips,” Russell said. “It will give us much greater capability and I think will improve the safety of our general operations.”

Beyond the current five year capital spending plan is the prospect of introducing what Russell has dubbed “son of TAAATS”, replacing Airservices’s existing hardware and software used in its Melbourne and Brisbane Centres.

“This is going to be the biggest thing that Air Services will do for the next seven or eight years,” said Russell. “We need to do it, our software and our hardware is getting very dated, and the lead times that are involved mean that we need to get under way with this. So we’ve been working on it for about a year, not only will it give us greater functionality and reliability and in particular the same time we look for a modern approach to redundancy, but it gives us the opportunity about the same time to look carefully with defence and some of our potentially some of our regional partners, about whether or not it’s possible to bring about the same platform or similar platform because from there a whole lot of further procurement issues arise, training issues rise, it really gives you the opportunity to bring about some really significant efficiencies and savings. So within a complex business this is a particularly complicated piece of work, and we’ve said that we don’t expect to be in a position to be able to provide our board with a recommendation for probably 12 months, there’s that much work that needs to be done.”

A “son of TAAATS” system would cost something in the order of $250-300 million, Russell estimated.

Other advanced technologies are currently being rolled out under the Air Traffic Management Services five year plan, which falls into the “service” category or Airservices’s “people, assets and services” strategy. That plan is a five year roadmap for Airservices’s four ‘service delivery’ environments – the east coast services, regional services and upper airspace services, plus network management services. Under those four categories fall an alphabet soup of service delivery programs – RNP, FUA (flexible use of airspace), ADS-B, WAM (wide area multi-lateration), UPRs and CDM (collaborative decision making).

CDM is particularly interesting as it requires not just of Airservices but of the airlines and airports a new approach to information sharing, such as notifying of delays, to allow for more efficient use of the national airspace system. The process has already begun with Airservices setting up its National Operations Centre, or NOC, in Canberra, a kind of mission control for the entire Australian air traffic management system to manage demand and capacity at a system-wide level.

“We’ve got to work much more closely with the airlines and the secret to efficiency in air traffic management, in my view the next big thing, is not just technology but its working together as an aviation industry and that National Operations Centre that we’ve set up in our Canberra office is all about that. CDM is a great concept, everyone puts their hands on their heart and says ‘yep CDM’, (but) when it comes to the practical implementation of it and the business rules that sit around it everybody’s got to give a little if it’s going to work properly.”
In other areas Russell points out that for all its critics, Airservices is leading much of the rest of the world in the roll-out of the latest air traffic management technologies.

“I recently had the opportunity to speak at the Naveris PBN conference in Seattle, part of the reason they asked me to go was that we’ve recently done this deal with Naveris to develop the procedures and design for RNP at eight of the major airports of Australia, we are so far ahead of the rest of the world that they wanted me to come there to talk about it and I hear with some amusement some of my colleagues in the ANSP industry how they are rolling out RNAV, I mean good god we’ve had that in this country and taken it for granted for years.”
And he cautions against undue haste in rushing to implement technologies like RNP without consideration of broader political issues, especially noise.

“I think we can step up with the efficiency with ATM, but the industry also needs to be well aware that need to effectively engage a community that’s very, very alerts to questions and changes of flightpaths and the uses of airspace.”

Airservices and industry could draw lessons from the recent changes made under the West Australian Route Project., Russell observed, which “technically was successful, it’s improved safety, it’s improved efficiency and capacity of that airport, but we’ve had some issues where frankly we didn’t do enough engagement with the local communities and I think it’s a wakeup call for this organisation, we’ve got to get much much better at engaging on these issues.”

Avoiding the big issues is certainly Russell can’t be accused of in his time as CEO or Airservices. That his tenure has been with its hiccups is undeniable, but equally it is clear that real progress is being made across a very broad and complex front.

“I say to people, this isn’t a job, this is a mission, and I know what this place can do, and believe it or not I get satisfaction out of seeing other people internally get the idea, and thankfully more and more of those light bulbs are going on.” n