Britain’s biggest budget airline, easyJet, has revealed a raft of measures to try to protect summer passengers from disruption caused by air-traffic control constraints, strikes and bad weather.
The carrier has adjusted crew rosters to reduce the risk of pilots and cabin crew going “out of hours”. It is “sharpening” the time spent on the ground between the arrival and departure of a flight. And easyJet has bought key spares for its fleet in advance.
Kenton Jarvis, easyJet’s chief executive, said air-traffic control (ATC) performance in Continental Europe had been “poor” for the last few months. “The French are probably the worst as usual, with Germany and the Greeks competing for a second spot on the deterioration in service, but this is something we anticipated.”
Holidaymakers flying in Europe face the worst air traffic control issues in a quarter of a century this summer – with 30 million UK air passengers set to be delayed between June and August.
“We’ve got better tools, so we’ve become more sophisticated in our use of the simulation tool that we call SkySym,” Mr Jarvis said.
“That allows us to put the schedule in; put the number of delay minutes we anticipate – which is a bad summer; and then see how it performs, and address the pinch points.
“If we’re going to have difficult air traffic control delays then our ability to recover them with sharper ‘turn times’ is important.”
EasyJet schedules its aircraft to be stationary on the ground for as little as half-an-hour between flights.
“We’re really sharpening our turn times again. It might be harsh to say we lost a bit of focus on this. But we’re seeing good results from refocusing on it.”
The easyJet boss said on-time performance in April was 2 per cent up on the previous year, and over the four days of Easter was 13 per cent better. But with extra pressure on air-traffic control, summer storms and possible strikes, the airline has put more slack in the system.
“We’ve split some of the more problematic crew pairings – where you want to do them because it helps maximise the productivity of the crew, but if you run up an hour’s worth of ATC delay in the day, then the crew go out of hours and you’re left cancelling flights.
“We’ve put more buffer in the system and we’ve split some of the most problematic crew pairings from last year.
“We don’t know when the summer storms start, and that’s difficult to cope with. But we know we’ve got better resilience and we’ve built a bit of slack in on top.”
Extra spare parts have been bought and deployed around the airline’s network because “you can’t run a just-in-time model any more and expect to receive the parts in quick order – you have to invest in having them.”
Mr Jarvis said strikes by refuelling staff at Gatwick working for Redline Oil had not caused any problems for easyJet.
“We were able to do pre-fuelling and not rely so heavily on the on-the-day service, and therefore it didn’t really impact us at all.”
Looking ahead to possible further disruption, he said: “It’s down to whether the air traffic controllers decide they want to put a strike in, and we’ll have to wait to see if they do that.
“But I’m hoping the resilience measures we have – and the fact that they should protect the overflying and just really doing it on a local level if it’s in France – should help.”
