Airline opens new AI equipped operations control centre
easyJet has opened a brand new operations Integrated Control Centre (ICC) in Luton to manage its daily flight programme of around 2000 flights.
The new centre has embedded AI into its day to day practices to aid faster and better decision making to help improve the customer experience.
More than 250 specialists work in the 24/7 control centre managing more than 340 easyJet aircraft flying up to 300,000 customers to 35 countries on more than 1000 routes to 155 airports every day.
Roles in the centre range from route planners, crewing teams to ensure pilots and crew are correctly allocated to flights, teams dealing with aircraft allocation and aircraft maintenance as well as live customer communications.
The new ICC facility has been thoughtfully designed to ensure the team have a calm environment where noise is limited, the team have natural daylight with dark desks and individual desk lighting so they can create the best working environment for them and a brand new rest room with reclining chairs and dark green walls and ceilings which is proven to engender a relaxing environment.
Johan Lundgren, CEO of easyJet, said: “We are really pleased to have our new operations control centre up and running in time for the summer season ramp up, providing our operational team with a modern and bespoke facility from which to manage up to 13,000 flights a week.
“At easyJet, we saw the potential early on for data to improve customer experience and operational efficiency which could help us provide a better flying experience for our customers, crew and pilots.
“And while you can’t always see it, the technology is already hard at work in the air and on the ground helping us predict exactly what food and drink we need for certain routes while minimising food waste, aiding predictive maintenance decisions and helping us to ensure we have the right aircraft on the right routes to best match demand.
“We continue to invest in and deepen our knowledge and use of AI, with a rapid deployment team working on 250 live use cases across our operations and scheduling, customer service, the booking experience and easyJet holidays.”
AI is also transforming the customers’ ability to fly where they want, when they want. Its predictive qualities are already being used to free up over a million additional seats a year.
Every month, thousands of planes are swapped, making sure larger capacity aircraft with up to around 50 more seats on each plane are deployed where AI predicts there is additional demand for seats on the most popular routes.
