“This is how we handle 300,000 passengers on 2,000 flights every day (and one problem every 10 minutes)”

What to do if a pilot got sick? How to reorganize timetables if a storm forces you to deviate from a route? And what happens when a plane has to stay on the ground for maintenance? A company like easyJet must not only find answers to these questions, but must do so continuously. Precisely once every 10 minutes. This is in fact the average number of interventions by the ICC, its integrated control centre.

We are in London, in a red brick and glass building surrounded by greenery, about ten minutes from Luton airport. Looking at it from the outside you would never know that it is hidden inside there brain of EasyJet, that is, a team of 250 people who work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. All decisions regarding the more than 2,000 daily flights carried out by the fleet of 330 aircraft are made here and each of these choices affects the 300,000 passengers on board these planes.

But how does this brain think? The technicians are divided into four teams: there are those in charge of managing the planes, those of the routes, those of the crews, and those of the passengers. Each of these groups has tripled, because there are three regulations to which easyJet must respond: the European one, the Swiss one and post-Brexit also the United Kingdom one.

But this is just one hemisphere of the brain of the company, the other is that which concerns the maintenance of the aircraft. A team of technicians and engineers works here who constantly takes care of the fleet and intervenes when necessary or just before it is necessary. Yes, because for 2 years now easyJet has started an experiment called Jetstream with artificial intelligence that allows it to carry out what I call “predictive maintenance”. Every time a plane touches the ground, in addition to the passengers, it also downloads enormous quantities of data which are processed by special algorithms developed with Airbus – the manufacturer of the fleet’s planes – and processed by artificial intelligence. So technicians can know when any component will need to be replaced before it actually has a problem. This allows maintenance to be carried out in a more efficient way, planning it rather than undergoing it in an emergency (although a Jet is always ready on the runway to bring highly specialized engineers to each of the 150 airports served by EasyJet). Very delicate interventions, inspections and maintenance but which the engineers proudly explain with a number: 98.7. It is the percentage of the available fleet compared to the total, a value that is among the highest of the airlines. Today, for example, there are only 4 planes on the ground for some type of intervention.

However, Jetstream is not the prerogative of maintenance, on the contrary. Today, for example, it also helps EasyJet decide how much food to bring on board or contains the eight operating manuals that help ICC specialists choose how to intervene.

It is therefore a constantly unstable balance that keeps this – like all other – airlines going. A Risk complex where the delay of a flight from Sharm El Sheik can affect passengers waiting to return home from Iceland and in the meantime reorganize the shifts of pilots and flight attendants. A behind-the-scenes job that the passenger experiences only by seeing two terms on the airport monitors: “on time” or “late”. It’s deleted? “For us it is a word that should not exist,” everyone at the Integrated Control Center says.