Flicking the switch

How Qantas managed to ground itself then get back in the air

“You can’t just turn an airline on and off,” Qantas spokesperson Olivia Wirth had told reporters in early October, yet only a few weeks later the airline did just that, causing disruptions for tens of thousands of passengers around the world.

Following its escalating battle with the three key unions, Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce announced at 5pm AEDT on Saturday, 29 October that the airline would lock out its pilots, ground crew and engineers from 8pm (AEDT) Monday, 31 October. More stunning than that was the announcement by Joyce that the airline would immediately ground its flights worldwide until further notice.

At the coalface were thousands of Qantas employees around the world, and helping to co-ordinate all that was the airline’s Integrated Operations Centre, based at its headquarters in Mascot. Heading up the IOC is Alan Milne, who explained to Australian Aviation that the centre functions as a nerve centre for the airline’s global operations.

“We have all the network responsible for reporting into the IOC about any sort of operational impact or risk, and it is our responsibility to get the messages and changes back out to the network and the operational areas,” he said.

It was Milne and his team of operations staff who were given the major task of grounding the airline, supporting the customer service staff at ports around the globe, and also preparing to get the airline back in the air once the grounding was lifted.

Although there has been some scepticism about how much planning Qantas had put into the grounding, the IOC was given little notice prior to Joyce’s media conference of the action that the airline was going to lock staff out, and would be grounding its operations in the meantime.

“I had the responsibility to go down to my guys on Saturday afternoon at 5pm and give them the briefing about what was happening,” he said.

“It made it a little bit more difficult because the risk assessment that flight operations had carried out was that once the announcement of the lockout was carried out, the risk assessment highlighted an increased operating risk with the pilots understanding that as of Sunday night they were locked out. With the standard conservative approach that Qantas takes to these things, the decision was made that we would cease all operations at that time.”

The immediate nature of that grounding meant that there wasn’t much time for the IOC staff to process the context, but rather they were forced to act immediately.

“I had to let our guys know that, by the way, I’ve only got about 10 minutes to stop the network,” explained Milne. “So I really didn’t have time to give them the background or the full understanding of how the decision had been arrived at, and really not much time for questions either.”

As a result of that, urgent communications started flowing from the IOC, turning what would have been an ordinary day into a flurry of activity. A number of staff around the world were sent text messages stating that the airline was grounded, while messages also went direct to aircraft through the ACARS messaging system. Many IOC staff were also making a flurry of phone calls to ports around the world to instruct ground staff on the actions to take, while some were required to meet aircraft that had been ordered back to their gates to explain the situation.

The end result was that within minutes of the announcement, all departing Qantas flights had been grounded, while those that were in the air would be grounded upon reaching their destinations.

“The actual logistics of the day were that eight minutes after I spoke to them, the Qantas operation had ceased,” said Milne.

For those aircraft that were still flying, the IOC continued to provide its regular in-flight support services to allow them to land at their next destination. That saw the last domestic flight arrive shortly after 9:20pm AEDT, while the last international flight arrived into Sydney from Los Angeles the following morning at 7:30am AEDT.

With operations grounded on Saturday evening, the IOC had to deal with the knock-on affects it was causing. “We started to have parking issues, particularly at Sydney,” said Milne. “We’re not used to parking our fleet on the ground, we usually have 80 per cent of them in the air, so we had issues for where we were going to put all the aeroplanes once they landed.”

As well as the slew of outgoing communications, the IOC also had to field a number of phone calls from Qantas staff around the network who were after more information. “Because we do put the IOC up as the focal point of the operation, that is of course what it was used for. So when something like this was announced, every man and his dog thought they had better ring the IOC to find out what was happening,” said Milne.

That included a number of pilots who were about to sign on for the afternoon. Many pilots were also concerned about what arrangements would be made if they were away from home base, particularly if the grounding went into the formal lockout period from 8pm on Monday, 31 October.

But top of mind for Milne and his team was ensuring that the tens of thousands of passengers who had found themselves stranded were effectively looked after while the status of the airline was still in limbo.

“We then had to turn to support the rest of our frontline staff and of course our customers and crews, and what could we do to lessen the impact of what had just happened – hotels, transport etc,” he said. “It was a bit of a rush at the last minute to see what we could organise.”

While the IOC staff were busy dealing with that fallout, Milne and his management team were also busy ensuring that they looked after their staff. “We had to start looking at our IOC staffing levels early on to see if we were going to be adequately manned for what we knew we were about to go through. We also had to look at the longer term issue of fatigue management with our team,” he said.

Interestingly, Milne and his line managers faced a situation where many of the IOC staff were geared up to deal with the situations that were emerging, but in some cases they had to take staff off to ensure that they were adequately rested to deal with it.

“The biggest concern I have with our IOC staff is that they are so attuned to resolving operational issues, so it becomes a concern to turn them off to ensure that they are getting adequate rest,” said Milne. “To try and tell someone right in the middle of it all that you have to stop that and go home and have a sleep is very difficult for them to do.”

To deal with that, the IOC took measures such as booking rooms at the nearby Holiday Inn to ensure that there was adequate rest for staff involved in the middle of the situation, as well as making sure there were adequate rest breaks for staff.

“My management team and I were in the same boat,” added Milne. “The last thing you wanted to do is walk away from it and drop everything. Eventually, when you force yourself to do that and go home and get some rest, it was impossible because your mind was so active.”

“I had to let our guys know that, by the way, I’ve only got about 10 minutes to stop the network.”

Filling the void

With the mainline Qantas fleet grounded, tens of thousands of passengers were left in limbo around Australia and the world.

Some assistance was given to Qantas passengers by the other Qantas Group carriers that remained flying. Jetstar in particular added a number of services, while Jetconnect, QantasLink and Express Freighters Australia operations remained as normal.

The biggest response came from Virgin Australia, which after the Qantas announcement made its own announcement that it was adding additional flights on key routes, as well as offering special fares to Qantas passengers who had been left stranded. However, those fares and spare seats sold out soon, forcing Virgin to look further for additional capacity.

It did so by bringing forward a plan to use Pacific Blue operated aircraft on domestic Australian services, and also looked at options to operate some of its Boeing 777-300ER services domestically. It also announced on 30 October that it was working with alliance partners Etihad Airways, Air New Zealand, Singapore Airlines and Delta Air Lines on options to ramp up capacity.

Etihad announced that it would operate some Sydney-Melbourne services over the coming week, utilising an Airbus A340‑600 that otherwise sat idle between flights to and from Abu Dhabi. The airline was also examining operating special Sydney-Bangkok services, but the resumption of Qantas services on 31 October  saw that plan cancelled.

At the same time, Strategic Airlines announced that it was putting on special ‘relief flights’ from Perth to Brisbane and Brisbane to Melbourne, utilising its A320s and A330-200.

The other domestic carrier, Tiger Airways, saw an influx of passengers on its services, but was not able to mount additional flights due to the current restrictions that CASA has placed on its Air Operator’s Certificate.

In the meantime

With Qantas aircraft on the ground following the Herculean efforts of the IOC, its attention then turned to handling the tens of thousands of passengers who were now stranded.

“We went into a customer recovery piece there. While we had the aeroplanes on the ground, we still had a lot of customers around the network who we then had to look after,” said Milne. “You may think that would have been a slower period, but in reality we were just ramping up.”

That saw the IOC assist ground staff in ports around the world to co-ordinate hotel bookings, ground transport and other services for Qantas passengers, as well as some assistance rebooking with other airlines.

Another major activity following the implementation of the grounding was planning for a restart of flying. Even though there was little direction over when that was likely to be, Milne explained that a lot of behind the scenes work was going on to ensure that the airline would be ready to resume flying as soon as possible.

“I asked all the guys in various parts of the operation to come back to me with what they needed to restart the operation,” said Milne. “I basically needed the risk assessment process from each of the businesses, what sort of mitigations they needed in place to get things going, and also from my guys I needed a constant review of the schedule.

“We had no idea when we would get the word to start flying again. It could have been 10 minutes after we announced the grounding, or it could have been 10 days – we just didn’t know.”

As a result, there were major logistical tasks that the IOC had to co-ordinate to ensure that the airline would be ready to restart operations at a moment’s notice. “We’d order catering in the hope that we would get a restart, and if it didn’t we had plans to distribute it. In Sydney, for example, we did that to the homeless in the city if we didn’t use the catering,” Milne said.

In the meantime, a number of Qantas staff still reported to work as usual. For the airline’s engineering staff, work continued as usual on the Saturday evening, even though they were within hours of being locked out.

Despite the looming threat of the lockout, by all accounts the pilots, engineers and ground staff affected continued to perform their necessary tasks right over the weekend.

“From five o’clock onwards on the Saturday, our engineers just performed as normally and as professionally as they normally would and had the aircraft available for us as usual on Sunday morning,” said Milne.

“It was actions like that which I was really impressed with. Even though it was a time of uncertainty for them, they still performed to their professional standard.”

That was not an easy task, with a number of aircraft scattered in far off ports, such as Dallas, London and Buenos Aires, while aircraft operating services from Europe were left grounded in Singapore. Locally, a number of domestic aircraft were located away from their main bases. In the uncertainty, it was not clear what crews could expect, while those that were in foreign ports at the time of the grounding also had to be kept on standby for when flights were to resume.

Despite the planned lockout, Milne said that as far as he was aware, there were no other plans being worked on if the fleet remained grounded for more than a few days.

“I don’t think we’d done too much of the longer term planning,” he said. “I don’t think we were looking at what would we do if this went on for a week or two or three, outside the assistance that would be offered by the other Qantas Group airlines.”

Turning it back on

Following the late night hearings across the weekend at Fair Work Australia, the announcement came through in the early hours of Monday morning that Fair Work Australia had terminated all industrial action.

Qantas announced on the Monday morning that passengers booked on flights departing after midday should go to the airport in anticipation of flights resuming shortly after that. However, a short delay in receiving CASA approval meant that the first scheduled flight, QF41 from Sydney to Jakarta, didn’t take off until shortly after 3pm.

With the first flights off, it was then a second mad flurry to get other flights out and clear the enormous backlog of passengers who had been disrupted. A number of domestic services were up-gauged to be operated by larger aircraft such as the A330s and Boeing 767s, while additional frequencies were also quickly added.

Remarkably, the airline quickly returned to a normal schedule by Wednesday, 2 November.

While the whole exercise was unprecedented, the process was helped by its prior experience handling the A380 groundings last year and the more recent volcanic ash groundings.

“If we had a situation like the A380 where we grounded the fleet, or the volcanic ash where we grounded a port, we upscaled those procedures to cater for the whole network around the world. That seemed to work quite well for us in this circumstance,” said Milne.

“I certainly saw a fantastic improvement in the way we managed our customer support. We know what our policies are now, we know how to get the extra funds if we need them quickly – we did all that so much faster.”

Currently, the largest learning from the exercise was to ensure that, if the airline was to be grounded indefinitely again, to shut down its sales infrastructure. “Qantas.com was still operating up to about eight o’clock on the Saturday night, which was just an oversight. But that was very specific to that particular situation,” said Milne.

Despite it being an unprecedented process, Milne noted that the professionalism of the Qantas staff during a very difficult time helped to allow it to run rather smoothly.

“I’ve been at Qantas for just under 30 years now, and I am yet to find a person in the organisation that isn’t passionate about the industry and the Qantas brand,” he said. “Sure, there may be a few little miscommunications or discussions about what is going on, but at the frontline you still just see the ultimate in professional behaviour from our staff. That is what makes my life easier during these types of events.”

Brought to you by the Australian Aviation Dec 2011 Archives