See inside American Airlines' massive flight operations center, where it dispatches 6,000 flights every day

23.05.2024 - 11:19 / insider.com

American Airlines' pilots, flight attendants, and airport staff are the face of nearly 6,000 flights operated by the carrier around the world each day.

However, a team of nearly 1,700 other employees who work behind the scenes in a giant operational center hidden from the public is just as essential to plane movement.

American invited Business Insider to tour its Integrated Operations Center, or IOC, at its headquarters in Dallas/Fort Worth. For privacy reasons, the company requested photos of certain screens, and employees' faces be blurred.

Mark Groat, American's IOC system customer service manager who led the mid-May tour, described the 149,000-square-foot, tornado-resistant IOC as the "nerve center" of the airline.

It runs 24 hours a day, every day of the year.The complex houses over 20 teams responsible for dispatching planes, monitoring weather, organizing maintenance and cargo, and preventing misconnects, among myriad other duties.

American's open-space IOC is strategically set up to enable communication and collaboration between the teams, Groat said.

For example, the lights are dimmed to reduce strain when looking at screens all day, and the phones use a color light system above each seat to indicate if that person is on a call.

"A red light means you're on the phone, and a green light means your phone is ringing," Groat said, noting the maintenance team, for example, has a line to airport hangars. "So, you can kind of gauge just looking over the floor what kind of day we're having."

He noted on busy days when everyone is talking and walking around, white noise is pumped into the IOC to keep the room quiet.

American's delay and cancellation rate isn't thebest in the US, but the carrier climbed to third place in 2023, according to the aviation data provider Cirium. It lost to Delta Air Lines and narrowly edged out United Airlines.

All of these disruptions pass through the heart of the IOC in a section called the "bridge." This is where the IOC director oversees and guides the thousands of daily flights.

Alongside the director are managers who work with American's hubs, like Dallas/Fort Worth, Miami, and Charlotte, to build plans for "irregular operations" that will impact the fewest customers possible. They're looking at things like staffing, resources, and gate constraints, Goat said.

While much of this analysis is done manually, Goat said American launched a new automation tool last year known as the "Hub Efficiency Analytics Tool," or HEAT, to help dispatchers, coordinators, and other employees make more proactive decisions.

It analyzes things like when a crew member exceeds their regulated duty period, which flights have the greatest number of connecting customers, how many top-tier