It was 3.53am on Tuesday when Ben Holland, the head of Qantas’ integrated operations centre, received a call from a duty manager.
Information was streaming in about two ultra-long-haul Qantas flights from Perth to London and Paris: one flow of information from the team working in the nerve centre at Qantas’ headquarters near Sydney Airport, and the other from pilots aboard one of the Boeing 787 Dreamliners.
Ben Holland is Qantas’ head of the integrated operations centre. Credit: Steven Siewert
Mumbai air traffic control had advised the pilots on QF9 bound for London that they would not permit the plane into their airspace. The closure of parts of the airspace in Qatar and the United Arab Emirates due to Iranian missile attacks on a US military base was causing a traffic jam in the skies above the Gulf.
“Once we saw the aircraft was entering a holding pattern prior to entering the Mumbai airspace, we enacted the processes or the contingency plans that had already been established,” Holland recalled.
Minutes after he received the first call, Holland joined a conference call of senior staff from multiple departments. In turn, QF9 was requested to divert to Singapore, and the other Qantas aircraft – QF33 – advised to return to Perth.
Tuesday’s diversions provide an insight into what Qantas and other international airlines are dealing with on a day-to-day basis as they navigate the disruption to passenger flights caused by the escalation of conflict in the Middle East, in addition to the three-year war in Ukraine.
The integrated operations centre at Qantas’ headquarters near Sydney Airport is a hive of activity.Credit: Steven Siewert
Flight corridors through the Middle East – one of the main avenues by air to Europe − have been significantly narrowed since the Iran-Israel conflict escalated. About a third of the world’s airspace is estimated to be off-limits to airline passenger aircraft because of conflict.
Even before the Iran-Israel war, Qantas has been at a heightened sense of readiness. Two months ago, the India-Pakistan conflict forced aircraft to be routed via the Middle East instead of over the so-called “stans” in central Asia.
Qantas chief risk officer Andrew Monaghan said escalation of conflict in the Middle East had started to become “more significant and more frequent” since the attacks by Hamas in Israel on October 7, 2023.
“We’re doing things more frequently in terms of risk assessment,” he said. “There’s just more effort that has to go into it because the availability of airspace is limited.”
Qantas chief risk officer Andrew Monaghan (left), integrated operations centre head Ben Holland and manager Scott Fenwick.Credit: Steven Siewert
Monaghan said the airline’s security experts believed the Middle East was experiencing the most military activity since the 1980s.
However, he emphasised that Qantas took a “conservative risk perspective”, and drew on multiple sources of intelligence and information to inform it, while using multi-layered processes to manage situations.
A day after the diversions, the integrated operations centre (IOC) is a hive of activity. High winds reduced Sydney Airport to a single-runway operation on Wednesday, causing flight delays due to a halving of aircraft being able to land.
Over a 24-hour period, the centre is staffed by about 150 people who work various shifts. Screens line the centre’s walls in a room that seems to take up nearly half a floor. All up, the IOC has a 450-strong workforce.
Holland, himself an A330 pilot, said the nerve centre for operations was responsible for the game plan for 350 flights each day. “We take the schedule, and we adjust it given the circumstances on the day. The frontline team then execute that game plan – the flight crew, the cabin crew, the engineers for those 350 flights,” he said.
“We try and set up the game plan as best possible. They go out and execute it, and then we work together to manage any disruption.”
A former Qantas A380 captain, Richard Woodward, said situations such as those in the Middle East were often “very fluid”, and any decision to divert was a balance between advice from the IOC and the crew’s first-hand knowledge of the situation.
“The IOC will offer a very strong preference about which airfield they would like you to go to because of ground support, accommodation for passengers, engineering capability and whether they can turn the jet around. In an A380, you have to consider alternative airfields and their ability to handle them,” he said.
Flights were diverted around the Gulf as Iran fired missiles at a US base in Qatar on Tuesday morning.Credit: Flight Radar 24
“It is a joint negotiation with strong advisory from the IOC. The airline will go out of its way to avoid conflict zones.”
Woodward, who is also a former RAAF test pilot, said the ultimate decision to divert or take other measures was the captain’s under civil aviation regulations. He flew Qantas A380s and Boeing 747s between Australia and London during his decades-long career, which involved avoiding conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and Ukraine during his time.
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