SEATTLE, Wash. -- Alaska Airlines Flight 72 is still 20 minutes away from the airport, but dozens of ramp workers, mechanics, fuelers, cleaners and gate agents are already staged for its arrival.
A large electronic sign above the airport's Gate C-11 displays the flight's vital statistics.
It tells the work team that the flight is coming from Juneau to Sea-Tac Airport. It also spells out where the flight goes next.
Most important, the screen counts down the minutes remaining until the plane must push back from the gate as Flight 464 bound for Los Angeles.
If Flight 72 is on time, that crew has an hour to deplane the Juneau passengers and their luggage, clean the aircraft, service the bathrooms, add fuel, load new baggage and passengers, and fix any mechanical or electronic issues that have developed on the flight down from southeast Alaska.
Odds are, they will succeed. Sea-Tac based Alaska Air ranks first among the nation's major airlines this year in on-time performance. In unofficial statistics compiled by Portland's Flightstats.com, 90.1 percent of Alaska's flights arrived on time in April.
It wasn't always so. Less than five years ago, Alaska ranked dead last among the 19 airlines tracked by the federal Department of Transportation, with just 69.7 percent of its flights arriving on time.
While Alaska's reputation for customer service over the years has ranked high, its on-time performance was less than mediocre. The airline ranked seventh among airlines the DOT tracks for on-time performance in the 23 years since the DOT began compiling on-time figures. That seventh ranking is not as good as it appears. Only eight domestic airlines that existed in September 1987 when tracking started are still flying today.
Alaska had excused itself for tardiness by citing its difficult flying conditions in remote parts of Alaska and on the foggy West Coast, said Ben Minicucci, Alaska chief operating officer. But he said that excuse was just a crutch for substandard performance.
The change of attitude began during an Alaska executives' retreat at the Semiahmoo resort north of Bellingham, Wash., in the fall of 2007, Minicucci said.
"We had an awful on-time record. We decided we had to fix it for the sake of our brand and our customers," he said.
THE FIX STARTS AT THE SEATTLE HUB
Minicucci and Diana Shaw, Alaska's managing director of its Sea-Tac hub, took on the challenge of fixing the airline's broken arrival record.
They began with Seattle -- the airline's biggest base.
"We figured if we could make things happen right first in Seattle, we could help on-time performance throughout the system," said Shaw.
Alaska was then launching about 150 flights a day from Sea-Tac, about 30 percent of its flights systemwide. Odds were that at least once a day, nearly every plane Alaska flew passed through Seattle.
If planes didn't leave Sea-Tac on time, they likely wouldn't arrive on time at other destinations.
Minicucci and Shaw abandoned the freeform system that existed at Sea-Tac and replaced it with a closely controlled, frequently measured system of small tasks. The two worked on both what they call "over-the-wing" and "under-the-wing" operations.
"Over-the-wing" procedures include passenger loading and unloading, ticketing, aircraft cleaning and servicing.
"Under-the-wing" operations include baggage handling, fueling, waste disposal and electrical connections.
They divided the flight preparation and boarding into dozens of small tasks, gave each a place in the chronological flow and allocated each a specific amount of time to be accomplished.
They charted each task performance daily on a large spreadsheet, a kind of visual report card, that an interdisciplinary team of managers reviews each day. The task results are color coded green, yellow or red to indicate whether they have been successfully accomplished on time. A quick glance at the chart shows where problems occurred and what trends are developing.
The object was to produce a report card with every cell green. As the red cells disappeared, the company's on-time performance improved.
If all of the tasks are accomplished according to plan, said Minicucci, the plane takes off on schedule.
Dividing the job of getting the plane ready for its next flight into smaller components, the airline tracks more than 50 separate tasks now allowed Alaska and contractor managers to optimize each task for efficiency.
But even as the system has moved to a mostly green scorecard, intermittent problems develop.
"We saw a problem emerging with catering in the last couple of days, for instance," said Shaw. "We're working with the food service to find the cause and fix it."
SYSTEM LIMITS CHAOS ON THE RAMP
The Alaska team realized that if its crews were going to be graded for their on-time accomplishments, they needed accurate information about flight schedules and timing. From that realization came the oversized electronic displays mounted outside each gate and at the elbow in the passenger bridge. That screen is visible to cabin attendants greeting passengers and monitoring the progress of the boarding process.
Information displays were also mounted inside the lounges and operations control areas where ramp crews and mechanics were dispatched.
Without the constantly updated displays, Alaska found the nomadic servicing crews didn't have an accurate idea of when the flight was due to leave and whether they were getting their jobs done on schedule.
The Alaska team paid particular attention to the ramp where an outside contractor, Menzies Aviation, had taken over bag handling from Alaska workers in 2005 after the airline and the ramp workers union couldn't agree on a contract.
That abrupt change from a seasoned crew of employees to a cadre of newly hired ones had thrown Alaska's ramp side into chaos for months. On-time results had plunged, and the airline experienced a spike in the number of ramp accidents, including one that caused a jet to make an emergency landing after it lost pressurization after takeoff.
While Menzies and the airline had made large efforts to correct the problem, the new team decided to study the issues with a microscope.
From that examination came a new way of staging the ground crews and equipment needed to service the aircraft.
Minicucci and Shaw, acting on input from the ground crews themselves, devised a system that requires all equipment and crew members to be in a specific area at the gate minutes before the flight arrives.
The airline painted boxes on the concrete at each gate where each piece of equipment, the belt loaders, the aircraft tugs, the baggage and refueling carts, the bathroom-serving vehicles and others, were to be parked before the plane approached.
Those boxes were outside the aircraft's safety zone, ensuring that an arriving aircraft didn't have to avoid randomly parked vehicles. The parking boxes also gave ramp supervisors a simple visual check on whether all the equipment necessary to service the plane was on hand on time.
"That ended the last-minute search for equipment to service the planes," said Shaw. "We found that we had more than enough equipment to handle our flights."
The designated parking spots also paid another dividend. Formerly, arriving aircraft were guided to their parking spots by three ground personnel -- a ramp crew member who stood in front of the aircraft in view of the cockpit who guided the pilots in the last few yards to their ultimate parking spot, and two "wing walkers" who ensured that the plane's wings didn't collide with ground equipment or other aircraft.
With all ground equipment parked in safe spots, Alaska eliminated and retasked the wing walkers to jobs that helped turn the plane around more quickly. One of those former wing walkers, for instance, was assigned to chock the plane's front wheels, a task necessary before the gate agent could begin moving the jet bridge toward the aircraft door.
Formerly, once the aircraft stopped, one of the wing walkers moved from his post at the wing tip to the gate, picked up the chocks and blocked the front wheels. The procedure change eliminated what had been a 30- to 45-second walk and got the jet bridge moving sooner.
The airline simplified and improved dozens of tasks. It worked with an outside vendor to better coordinate the movement of passengers who use wheelchairs. At the peak of the summer travel season at Sea-Tac, Alaska provides up to 600 wheelchairs a day for passengers with mobility problems.
The team also discovered a pattern of planes returning to the gate because the bathrooms hadn't been serviced on the ground.
Cabin attendants were discovering those problems only after the plane had pushed back from the gates. A simple change in procedure eliminated that problem.
SPREADING THE GOSPEL OF TIMELINESS
Meanwhile, in the ticketing lobby, Alaska installed its "Airport of the Future" ticketing design, which substitutes numerous ticketing and baggage tagging islands for the old long counter.
The new design, said Minicucci, let the airline double its ticketing capability with fewer ticketing personnel.
At the gate itself, Alaska installed new screens to keep passengers informed about boarding. At the baggage claim carousels, Alaska hung video screens in the baggage claim area to indicate which carousel was handling baggage from which flight.
Back at the gate, the airline put new emphasis on communication between gate personnel and the cabin crews. That communication allows gate personnel to begin to gate check carry-on luggage when the overhead bins are getting full, a phenomenon happening more frequently since Alaska and other airlines began charging for checked bags.
Once the new procedures were operating smoothly at Sea-Tac, the company spread the gospel of timeliness to other busy Alaska Airlines airports in Los Angeles, Anchorage and Portland. Now, in the program's third year, the expectations have spread throughout the system, including airports where the one or two flights a day are serviced by other airlines.
"It seemed strange at first for those other airline workers to adopt our way of doing business," said Minicucci, "but they've done a good job of accepting our system."
In addition to monitoring 50 or so tasks each day, the airline takes a longer range look at trends that could affect its on-time record. The airline knows, for instance, that summer is its busiest season, since that's when tourism crests in Alaska. It plans to increase its daily Sea-Tac flights from the present 114 to 135 in midsummer. That means increasing its work force both on the ramp and on the concourses.
All of the on-time improvements have come amidst higher load factors, the percentage of seats filled on flights.
Now that Alaska has moved to first place in the on-time derby, can it maintain its ranking?
Minicucci thinks that's doable. After all, who would have thought three years ago, he said, that an airline long a basement dweller in the on-time pennant race could move to the top of the standings?
By JOHN GILLIE
Tacoma (Wash.) News Tribune