Airline Disruption Management: A Naturalistic Decision-Making Perspective in an Operational Control Centre

Operations Control Centres (OCCs) are critical structures used by airlines to oversee the execution of all planned flights, managing punctuality, regularity and customer support. In this study, we investigated the decision-making during flight disruptions inside an OCC from the naturalistic decision-making perspective. We conducted a mini-ethnography case study in a major South American airline, focussing on how functions critical to the flight disruption management cope with variability. Data collection included document analyses, field notes, direct observations and interviews. The functional description of work-as-done revealed how the OCC constantly and actively looks for signs of disruption while monitoring the normal operation and rebalancing resources. The decision-making process is distributed and decentralised across multiple functions, where experts from each function rely on a repertoire of strategies to deploy innovative solutions to dynamic scenarios. Five different mechanisms were identified that converge functions to disarm potential disruptions before they compromise the flight network, and continuously create and reinforce system buffers.