The simple act you can do to help your flight leave on time

Saturday, 9 March 2024

It may sound simple, and it is probably something you already do, but airlines are really happy when you check-in online as that’s a big help in getting your plane away on time.

That’s from Nicholas Tajudin, a senior manager at Jetstar’s Operations Control Centre. He is tasked alongside dozens of other workers with making sure flights leave on time, crews are where they should be, and customers get the support they need.

“Many things come from online (check-in). We can then communicate what gate you are departing from, is it on-time, if there’s a five-minute delay etc. We can push what’s happening with operations through to the customers,” said Tajudin.

Stuff Travel was recently given a rare insight into Jetstar’s operations HQ in the Melbourne suburb of Collingwood.

The large open-plan office is much like any other work place. Computers hum gently, there’s chatter from various pods, with multiple TVs showing news and stats. The only things that make it stand out as the central hub of an airline are the occasional bright orange Jetstar logos and the frequency of aircraft tracking service Flightradar24 on screens.

At the centre is Samir Ahmed. As senior ops controller he is the conductor in this orchestra made up of customer recovery teams, ops controllers, crew supervisors, flight dispatch coordinators and the maintenance operation centre.

On the monitors in front of him are all the Jetstar flights for the day, the ones which are waiting to take off, are airborne or have just landed. There are just over 330 flights a day under his gaze.

This is the “heart” of the room with constant updates from the crewing system, the customers’ system as well as from the various airports that Jetstar operates at. If there’s a delay at, say Auckland, the ground crew there feeds it into the system, which alerts Ahmed and goes on to the likes of Google to update any changes to flight times.

Also close by is the most important TV monitor in the room, the display showing the on-time performance (OTP) for New Zealand, Australia and international.

Ahmed admits that’s the screen he looks at most all day.

On the day Stuff Travel was in the office, he said New Zealand was doing “relatively good” on that particular shift: “We are sitting at 70% on-time performance. We had a few issues in Wellington earlier, a few aircraft were on the ground at the same time and we had a lot of passenger no-shows at the gate.

“Yesterday we finished really good in New Zealand, 87.5%. That was a good day.”

And yes, before you ask, they do sometimes hit 100%. And the measure for what is regarded as running on time? It begins when the plane starts being pushed back and there’s a 15-minute buffer added in, so if a flight says it is leaving at 5pm, but doesn’t start pushing back until 5.10pm, it is still regarded as on time.

Tajudin said operations in New Zealand have “really turned around”.

“Safety is always first but we do put a lot of pressure on us as a business to deliver OTP. You are always driving for excellence.”

The stats show that in January, Jetstar achieved an OTP of 81.5% in NZ, and a domestic cancellation rate of 0.9% – the lowest it's been since pre-Covid. That’s a marked improvement from July last year when it was an OTP of 68.4% and a 3.1% cancellation rate.

Tajudin said that’s down to a number of factors including the staff hired after the depths of the pandemic bedding in, as well as new efficient aircraft.

“The staff have been in the system now for 18 months. Everyone knows what they are doing and are setting operations up to succeed. We’ve got new aircraft … the Neo. That’s really helped operationally. They fly further, are more fuel efficient and we don’t see as many defects on that aircraft as there are on some others.

“The mindset of the total operation has changed.”

Another factor which has helped is the change in check-in and bag drop times. Tajudin said the increase of the cut-off time from 30 minutes to 40 minutes has helped “100%”.

“Customers like it, they prefer it. They can do it quickly, and go straight through to a cafe and wait for their flight.”

But while a plane can be delayed for any number of reasons out of the airline’s control, including passengers who turn up late, Ahmed said what they can control is “the knock-on effect”.

“If an aircraft is delayed we can probably look to a different aircraft and bring it back on time rather than just delay the whole day.” In essence it’s a big jigsaw puzzle.

As for the challenges of operating in New Zealand, both agree on one thing, “the weather“. Of course Wellington’s infamous wind gets a mention, but it’s not the most difficult airport.

“Queenstown has got a lot of restrictions on it specific to pilots and how they operate, so it makes it more challenging than any other airport we fly to,” said Tajudin.

“There’s only a certain cohort of pilots who can do it cause the training is so intense.”

Both acknowledge that there will always be work to do, and things won’t go always go to plan, but the aim is to achieve a daily OTP consistently in the 90s in New Zealand.

“There are certain things we have to do to deliver on that, changing some of the customer focus, better operations through technology,” said Tajudin.

Another focus is changing the mindset of customers travelling to the airport.

“The next step is almost full online check-in. How we get people to do that so they won’t be lining up queues, you just go in, get a bag tag and off you go.”

And one final tip to reduce your chances of a delay - get the first flight of the day. Tajudin said the airline has a specific focus on getting that first plane away on time so the rest of the day flies as smoothly as possible.

The author was hosted by Jetstar.