Name: From Touchdown to Takeoff: Why Airlines Spend Millions Perfecting Turnarounds
Uploaded: 2025-06-04T14:00:00Z
Duration: 8 min 12 s
Description: British Airways has invested some $135 million into AI and high-tech operations centers to try and improve the punctuality of its flights. WSJ explores the logistics behind the aircraft turnaround.

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British Airways has invested some $135 million into AI and high-tech operations centers to try and improve the punctuality of its flights. WSJ explores the logistics behind the aircraft turnaround. Photo Illustration: George Downs/The Wall Street Journal

https://m.wsj.net/video/20250603/eafc8ecc-1b7a-447c-ad2c-b27d0bdf67b8/1/hls/manifest-hd-wifi.m3u8

British Airways has invested some $135 million into AI and high-tech operations centers to try and improve the punctuality of its flights. WSJ explores the logistics behind the aircraft turnaround.

From Touchdown to Takeoff: Why Airlines Spend Millions Perfecting Turnarounds

George: These airline staff have just two minutes to get this jetty attached and the doors of this plane open in order to stay on schedule. See, while the passenger's flight may have just ended, for British Airways, a complex race is just beginning, one it has to perform over 300 times every single day at just one airport alone. It's the race to turn a plane around ready for the next wave of passengers and get up to 35 aircraft an hour airborne as efficiently as possible. If it isn't done correctly, it could cause a domino effect of delays. That's why BA has spent over $130 million on improving punctuality, taking it from a time when more than half of its flights were delayed to reaching 86% punctuality. Behind the shift lies AI and high tech operation centers.

This is largely like a big game of Tetris, but not one where you clean the lines and it disappears. It kinda keeps dropping down.

George: So what does it take to get a flight to leave on time? This is the logistics behind the aircraft turnaround. British Airways' playbook for turning round an aircraft is called the Precision Time Schedule, or PTS. For short off flights, it takes about 50 minutes, and it begins by assigning teams the moment a plane lands.

Which should be our loading team, our baggage logistics drivers, and our aircraft dispatch manager.

George: For BA it's especially important that their short haul aircraft are turned around on time here at London Heathrow. It's not only the company's hub airport, but it's also one of the busiest airports in the world with one runway for departures and one for arrivals.

We have circa about almost 80 flights departing before 9:30 in the morning. And the domino effect that we can have in terms of not getting the first wave right, we'll see that for the rest of the day.

George: As the plane arrives on the stand, this aircraft guidance system guides the plane to the exact right position.

We'll come to a complete stop, engines off. When it's safe to do so, our teams will then engage the aircraft. So that's everything from trucking the aircraft, putting cones around it, and attaching the jetty onto the aircraft. So getting that door open within two minutes is incredibly important.

George: But even at this stage, there's the potential for delays to occur. For this fight, the jet bridge suffered a mechanical fault, which took a few minutes for BA to fix before they could disembark passengers.

You can feel the pressure already building when you can't get the customer door open, but we have plans and mitigations in place. Can we get the jetty back up? Talking to the airport operator. Can we get an engineer out to fix the jetty?

George: Meanwhile, cargo and baggage, which gets stored in these containers to increase efficiency, is being offloaded. And at the rear of the plane, a cleaning crew arrives, which on this size of aircraft will have up to nine minutes to completely clean the plane. So they begin while passengers are still disembarking. Once all the passengers are off, a fuel truck arrives under the wing, but this truck isn't actually carrying any fuel itself. At Heathrow fuel is piped through these hydrants and connected to the plane via pipes on the truck, saving time as the fuel truck doesn't have to go back and refuel. As the fuel makes its way onto the aircraft, so does the catering crew. It's their job to remove the used food trays and restock the plane with fresh pre-ordered meals, starting with the front.

Ben: But by doing the forward door first, we could then start our boarding of our customers.

George: And it's not just empty food trays and trash that has to be removed. The toilets have to be emptied too. At this point, there are no fewer than six teams, some of which are third parties, all working around the aircraft to the precision time schedule.

Everyone's got clear guidance on what needs to happen at what sequence. As soon as you go outside of that sequence, you know at what point where you're running behind and what you can try and do to catch up.

George: If they do fall behind, the aircraft dispatch managers try and get the aircraft back on track.

Can we get the cleaners to work a bit quicker? Can we start boarding early? Do what we need to do to actually make up the time? So although we have a time that we work to, so 50, 55 minutes as an example, actually we could do this in 45 minutes.

George: Other carriers are doing this even quicker. Budget airline Ryanair tries to turn its flights around in as little as 25 minutes. And when Southwest was struggling to turn a profit in the 1970s, the company even pushed for a 10 minute turnaround with cabin crew and even pilots helping to clean up trash. Meanwhile, back at Heathrow, a new crew has arrived. The first officer conducts an inspection of the aircraft, checking for any damage and defects while the pilot and cabin crew carry out checks on board. New baggage and cargo is loaded onto the plane with each container being placed in a predetermined order to ensure the plane stays balanced in air. And at the airport gate, passengers are already waiting to board the flight.

We've got them ready behind the gate area, ready to board. Any push chairs, handbags, we make sure they're tagged up and ready as well.

George: Back in the cockpit, the crew are kept up to date with the boarding process via this sign, which tells them how many passengers and bags they're waiting for and how long until departure. With around 15 minutes to go, the fuel truck and catering truck depart the stand and the baggage handling team finish loading the plane. At the front, a ground operations lead is connecting this remote controlled electric tug to the front wheels, ready to push the plane back from the stand. Finally, with the last few passengers boarded and seated, the cabin crew closes the door, the jetty is pulled back, and the tug pushes the aircraft back out onto the taxiway ready for departure. But that's just one flight outta BA's fleet of 275 planes. So to manage their aircraft, BA has two new operation centers, one for all flights departing from Heathrow, and another that manages the over 200 other airports that BA serves. Here, teams work around the clock to monitor anything that could cause a delay, from mechanical issues to weather patterns and from shifting geopolitical tensions to airspace restrictions. Both facilities opened recently as part of a multi-billion dollar investment by BA to try and improve customer experience and reduce delays. See, back in 2008, less than half of the company's flights were leaving on time. BA had moved into the newly opened Heathrow Terminal 5 building and immediately ran into headwinds as baggage cause delays and cancellations.

We once again apologize to customers for the problems.

Interviewer: Do you accept that the airline has gone from the world's favorite airline to the world's most shambolic airline?

No, I don't accept that.

George: The company needed to rebuild its punctuality and its reputation. A decade later, by 2018, punctuality had improved to around 75%, but that still meant that one in every four flights would be delayed. But fast forward to today and BA has hit new punctuality records for the first quarter of 2025 powered, it says, by its investment into digital and AI tools, including screens like these.

It gives a situational awareness of everything that's going on across our terminals, everything from CCTV to weather radar systems. Our mission control screen, that gives us visibility of all of our aircraft on the airfield.

George: The company is using AI tools for everything from a weather modeling system that suggests preferable flight routes to a stand allocation tool that factors in passengers connecting flights when allocating stands, essentially trying to ensure nobody misses a connection. Another tool called Runway can even suggest the least disruptive course of action if a flight does have an issue, whether to cancel it, delay it, or try and bring in a spare aircraft. But these systems are only effective if an aircraft is on time to begin with, and its Ben's job to allocate planes to make sure that happens.

We inherit the schedule 10 days before departure, and we are constantly chopping and changing that schedule. And as you can see over the 10 day window, each aircraft here will do sort of around six flights a day. So that'll come in and out of Heathrow three to four times per day

George: If delays occur, this can leave an aircraft out of position and unable to make its next scheduled flight, but an AI tool called Pathfinder can help manage that.

So it looks at historical punctuality and operational performance and essentially predicts the probability of a service being delayed. And the delay prediction model allows us to put the buffer in the right points in the schedule to absorb those delays. Being able to nip and tuck, gaining five minutes here or there and minimize delays, helps to prevent that domino effect.

George: But even if AI can help suggest efficient ways through setbacks, it won't always be able to prevent them from happening in the first place.

Life is complicated, and our operation is incredibly complex. There's just so many variables in our operation, and so much of that is external factors that we just can't control.