Inside the Jetstar centre where flights are cleared or cancelled

Other screens show the TV news. Sometimes the JOCC is ahead of the news cycle; at others, the news beats their decision-making.

When this masthead visited in August, there was an undercurrent of energy – the buzz of attention focused on so many details simultaneously in the effort to control Jetstar’s sprawling flight network.

Curtain is also the person who holds and cancels flights. Her hope – and the airline’s – is to minimise delays and cancellations. This means making aircraft swaps and switching flights around to mitigate disruptions.

Chief operations officer Matt Franzi said that as an economy airline, Jetstar maximises the number of passengers on flights. “Making the decision to cancel a flight does cause disruption to our customers, and it’s very difficult and challenging for us … because we don’t carry spare seats.

“We always approach [cancellations] as a last resort,” Franzi said. “The reasons for it, first and foremost, are safety. That will typically be the number one reason that we would have to cancel.”

Curtain said that when issues arise, “it does become quite fast-paced in here”.

“We’ve got passengers sitting on aircraft or waiting to board, and we’ve got flights.

“All the airlines are competing for the slots,” Curtain said, referring to the permission for a specific aircraft movement at a specific time on a specific day.

Pointing to the screen running the slot management platform, Curtain said that if a rival airline cancels a flight and the slot opens, “it’s a race to whoever gets it first”.

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“We’ve got a great team in here. It’s a lot of fun unless it really is all falling apart when there’s really bad weather,” she added.

If a disruption is big enough – planes out of service, fog, storms, typhoons, volcanoes, tsunamis – Curtain turns to duty manager Lois May, who oversees not just daily operations but emerging issues that could affect the network.

As the most senior person in the operation, May calls a huddle of experts who are seated around her in cubicle pods.

To May’s right, there are people managing flight dispatching and load control for Jetstar 787s; then the crewing desk.

Curtain and her team sit in front of May, at arm’s length. To the left is the customer recovery team, now known as “customer journey” – the people who make arrangements for transportation and hotels if passengers are stranded.

“We do over 90 flights a week to Bali,” said Franzi. “That’s tens of thousands of customers in a week.

“But if a volcano goes off and closes that airspace for a few days, that’s a lot of customers to engage for recovery flights.”

Franzi notes that airports themselves can be constraints on smooth flying; sickness and lower staff levels slow the volume of take-offs and landings.

“There’s a lot more airspace than there are airports, so you can get a lot of aircraft up in the air, but you’ve only got so many runways and so many gates to land at,” Franzi said.

When an airline cannot get aircraft to take off and has more aircraft coming in, it creates a situation known as “compression”. “That disruption in the network can cause quite a lot of challenges,” he added.

In October, Jetstar’s on-time arrivals stood at 73.1 per cent, just over Qantas and Virgin’s at 72.1 per cent, government data shows. Although Jetstar is owned by Qantas, it operates independently. Qantas’ operations centre is in Sydney.

Also to the left of May’s workstation is the engineering department. Even though it is not technically part of the JOCC, its members collaborate with May’s teams to advise on the schedules of planes that are being repaired.

A smooth day sometimes requires a bit of luck in the morning. “If we get our first flights out on time, then generally, that’s key,” said May.

“You’ve got your aircraft maybe doing six to eight sectors a day,” she added, referring to the individual legs travelled by a single plane.

“So if you’re not starting off on time that can run into delays and then you can start running into issues at the other end of the day, particularly when you have curfews.”

Sydney, Adelaide and Gold Coast airport curfews add constraints to finishing the flying day of a plane.

Over half of Jetstar’s domestic network touches Queensland, while its international routes keep expanding to places like Cebu, in the Philippines, and Colombo, Sri Lanka.

Other challenges are smaller in scale, but still difficult. “You can get some really sad times where you can have passengers pass away on a flight,” May said.

The flow of the work is always changing. “I’ve been here almost 21 years,” May said. “I’ve been in the aviation industry for many, many years. I love it. It’s dynamic.

“No two days are the same, and it’s just forever evolving, and things can move so fast. And I think we’ve become a bit of adrenaline junkies sometimes.”

May said she has only one coffee a day. “I am very regimented with my diet, my water intake and my sleep,” she added. “So when I’m working, it’s work, eat, sleep, work, eat, sleep.”

Most of the staff run 12-hour shifts from 6am to 6pm on a 24-hour schedule, and they rotate between days and nights.

The long shifts help ensure continuity between staff on handovers between work periods. Crewing officers and controllers work eight-hour shifts.

“I will hand over to my night shift tonight, and then I’ll be back again [after 12 hours],” May said.

Franzi said he’s able to sleep well because he has such a “strong team”. But he does still get phone calls in the middle of the night.

“You know, I had one from one of the team on the weekend at 3am for a quick conversation about a particular challenge, which was an unruly customer situation.”

Franzi said he was able to understand what was happening and make some decisions.

Then he got back into bed for some sleep, “in case another phone call comes in”.

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