Emirates senior executive Nathan Thomas is in command of day-of-flight operations at the airline, with hundreds of flights under his watch every day.
In the rapid recovery from the pandemic, close to 100 of the airline’s flagship Airbus A380s are back in the air and so are most of its 150 Boeing 777s.
On the day of a tour of the operations base, Thomas — senior vice-president of network control — said that in early 2020, the scene on the airfield across the road was far different.
Now the busiest international airport in the world, Dubai was ghostly quiet back then. For a brief time in April that year, the massive Emirates fleet was idle as the pandemic hit.
“I am the person who sent the email to ground the fleet,” says Thomas. “It was very stressful, there were a lot of sleepless nights.
“It was continuously changing, the directions that were coming, nothing was consistent.”
Rules would change daily, as borders opened and then closed within 24 hours.
“When we started with the repatriation [flights] it was very difficult. Some countries were flexible, other countries were very rigid.”
At its lowest ebb, the network control centre was down to a skeleton staff of just three.
“It was an interesting time,” says Thomas.
But now, staff numbers are approaching pre-pandemic levels of 50 to 60 people per shift, controlling Emirates aircraft as they arrive and depart in waves throughout the day.
The airline has the biggest longhaul fleet in the world and its planes fly to six continents.
Wave one starts late in the evening and runs until 4am, with the big Emirates jets coming mainly from Europe and then departing to the Asia-Pacific region.
Wave two lasts until 11am, coming mainly from the Asia-Pacific (including New Zealand) and Africa, and departing to Europe, North America (and New Zealand). Wave three lands from the Asia-Pacific from 11am to 5pm and departs mainly to Europe. And the fourth wave, from 6pm to 11pm, comes mainly from North America and flies to Asia.
Thomas’ team has command of day-of-operation flying.
“Our commercial team upstairs have built all of our schedules and they’ve negotiated all the slots, sold all the seats, they hand it over to us to run about minus 72 hours to minus 48 hours to departure, this room takes over. We’re looking at that connectivity for all of our customers, be they passenger or cargo, to make sure we optimise everything and deliver the product that we’ve sold.”
Thomas has a “lovely” view across the airfield, but “what we’re doing is we’re looking after the entire Emirates network. This is only 50 per cent of what we’re interested in. The other 50 per cent is everything in the air across the Emirates network”.
This is monitored on a vast screen at the back of the room which uses a tailored business version of FlightRadar, showing only Emirates planes. There’s also a constant local weather feed with information about conditions at Al Maktoum International Airport, also known as Dubai World Central, an international airport more than 30km southwest of Dubai. That weather feed is important as it provides an early indication of any fog. In a part of the screen there is an international news feed from CNN.
In the ops room, it’s a bit like mission control for a space flight. Among the different squads, Thomas points out the crew control team which looks after crew on the day of flying.
“They’re looking after our sizeable group of pilots and cabin crew but they’re only interested in today; we have a whole ‘nother team looking after future rosters, they’re only looking at 24 hours.”
The international flight dispatchers — licensed by the local Civil Aviation Authority — are providing all of the flight plans for fuel requirements, and liaising with all crews to make sure flights are planned efficiently with the right fuel loads based on destination, weather or any other restriction that may require additional loads.
“They’re having to look to make sure we can optimise our passenger uplift, our cargo uplift, make ourselves as efficient as possible.”
The maintenance control department monitors all flights in the air or at stations at other destinations. Dealing with any technical problem will be co-ordinated here using either contracted engineers or Emirates’ own engineers. The maintenance controllers monitor the downloading of technical information from planes as they are flying.
“But Boeing and Airbus are also monitoring our flights and they take it to a whole new level. A lot of it is protected from pilots, as I understand so that they’re not overloaded with unnecessary information.”
Emirates pushes its fleet hard. The big widebody planes are in use for up to 20 hours a day and a flexible maintenance system means the airline doesn’t need to have spare aircraft parked at Dubai Airport.
The airport services team looks at myriad problems. They work very closely with all the teams in the terminal buildings, and liaise with them to look at passenger connectivity. They do all the aircraft stand (parking spot) planning.
“If a flight is inbound from, say, Ahmedabad with a high number of passengers onwards to London Heathrow, we don’t want the Ahmedabad flight landing in concourse A, all the connections are in concourse B. It’s very dynamic.”
Emirates sets a connection time of 60 to 75 minutes.
“For the most part that works, but every now and again you get these services that have high baggage volumes and that can really create a challenge for all of our resources and the other half of our business, Dnata, that provides ground handling.”
On the day in July when the Herald was in the centre, Emirates was carrying about 150,000 passengers on the network.
“Transits are the real challenge ... it’s Hajj season at the moment so flights are coming back from Jeddah carrying huge volumes of baggage. They may not be huge themselves, but the number of pieces is significant.”
A catering representative monitors operations in Dubai and around the network.
“Post-pandemic, there’s been lots of challenges with supply chain logistics and that means that we’re not using our traditional points for catering.”
One example was in Britain, where food is transported by road because the caterer near the airport couldn’t provide food to the Emirates standard.
“There’s a lot of that going on around the network. It’s co-ordinated from here, so it does give a little bit of a challenge.”
The amount of food on board needs to match the number of passengers.
“That will be co-ordinated to make sure that if we need to close reservations, we will. If we need to increase the catering, they’ll work out the logistics of making sure that occurs.”
Among the problems on any day are late passengers. Thomas says that with Dubai being such a large airport, some passengers unfamiliar with it struggle to find their way.
Big problems are air traffic restrictions in Europe and weather problems. Temperatures exceeding 44C on the airfield can mean payload restrictions, dust storms can limit the number of planes that can be dispatched each hour and fog can be a problem at some times of the year.
“And as in all industries, I think, technically we’re struggling with supply chain logistics, spare parts. Airlines are a little bit luckier, we tend to have a big stock.”
The airline hasn’t been badly affected by weather on the longest of its ultra-long routes, to Auckland and Los Angeles.
“In all the years since we first started operating our ultra-long range, we have had very few diversions that are as a result of a change in conditions from the generation of that flight package [for the day] and the change of conditions very rarely has resulted in a tech stop en route.”
Grant Bradley has been working at the Herald since 1993. He is the Business Herald’s deputy editor and covers aviation and tourism.
The airline sold its last slots at Heathrow in 2020.