Orlando International Airport ranks as one of the nation’s busiest and is building a $2.8 billion terminal, but only now is the airport poised to host a critical airline operation performed in relatively few other cities.
The 8th largest airline in the U.S., Florida-based Spirit Airlines announced Tuesday it will split its flight operation-control center at company headquarters in Miramar, moving 40 percent of its staff to a hurricane-hardened facility at Orlando International Airport.
Hurricane resilience is a key reason for setting up a new operations-control center at Orlando International Airport, but COVID-19 taught the airline that it would be doable and advisable, Spirit officials said.
“All the airlines have only one operations-control center and they typically are in those bigger cities,” said Greg Christopher, Spirit’s operations vice president. “This is a unique situation.”
Those 70 center workers transferred to Orlando will come with average salaries of at least $70,000, according to Spirit, and the staff is slated to grow to 100 workers as the nearly 20-year-old airline grows.
Airport director Phil Brown said apart from any status symbol of hosting an operations-control center, the move shows a growing commitment from an airline at a needed time.
“I will tell you that to add more jobs to the community when hopefully we are on a downswing from the pandemic, we are grateful,” Brown said.
Operations-control centers are the high-tech, highly connected nerve centers for airlines, handling flights from before takeoff to after landing.
Other center locations include American’s in Fort Worth, Delta’s in Atlanta, Frontier’s in Denver, JetBlue’s in New York, Southwest’s in Dallas and United’s in Chicago.
As with other airlines, Spirit responded to the pandemic by temporarily setting up separate operations-control centers in Miramar to ensure ongoing operations. Christopher said there were as many as three centers at one time, with some staffers working from home.
“We decided to operate out of two locations on a permanent basis and it made sense to separate them by some distance,” Christopher said. “While all of Florida is subject to hurricanes, Orlando is less so.”
Christopher said both centers will determine aircraft types and crews for each flight, ensure maintenance needs are met, decide for each flight the “highway in the sky” for how fast and how high a plane will fly, and determine the amount of fuel needed.
Once in the air, the center will monitor the status of flights, watch for storms or other trouble, determine rerouting and assist with medical and security emergencies.
Among security measures that might be dealt with is a potential incident over mask wearing.
With new mandates for wearing masks imposed by President Biden’s administration, the Orlando airport announced Tuesday efforts to bolstering signage and audio messaging about mandatory usage.
The ultra-low-cost Spirit has nearly 1,200 workers at its Orlando base, which is the second largest for the airline. Spirit’s biggest presence is at Fort Lauderdale’s airport.
Spirit also is the third largest airline at Orlando International, behind Southwest and Delta, for number of daily flights and total number of seats.
The airline will occupy a operations-control center built by AirTran Airways, which had been based at Orlando International Airport, but was acquired a decade ago and folded into Southwest Airlines.
The facility has a generator, multiple data connections and is fully redundant. It will have nearly all of the capabilities of the airline’s South Florida center, minus some support duties such as parts procurement, Christopher said.
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