Spirit still moving to BNA?

Rhewster

Well-Known Member
Does anyone know if they are still moving to BNA or did they delay their plans because of this crazy virus?
 
According to this article from yesterday, it sounds like Spirit will be permanently running two separate OCCs in Miramar and Orlando, with the latter being at the former AirTran OCC. Seems like the BNA plans may have been scrapped.

 
Here’s the story for those that don’t like picking around pop-up ads and auto-playing videos:


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.
 
Thanks for posting the article text! It seems like operating an airline this way would present a lot of management and training challenges and extra expense. It's their airline, of course. However, the quote “All the airlines have only one operations-control center and they typically are in those bigger cities" is not entirely accurate - where I work at, we are in two separate facilities and have been since last summer. (They are both in the same metropolitan area, but many miles apart.) We will likely continue to operate this way until the pandemic ends. It is true that we don't plan on doing it permanently, as far as I know, and it sounds like Spirit is. Interesting approach, to say the least.
 
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According to this article from yesterday, it sounds like Spirit will be permanently running two separate OCCs in Miramar and Orlando, with the latter being at the former AirTran OCC. Seems like the BNA plans may have been scrapped.

Yeah, it sounds like that's the immediate plan at least.

Because hurricanes always go where they're supposed to (Sharpie joke).
 
I also am curious if jetBlue is planning on moving their OCC out of NYC area too. Didnt they talk about moving it to Orlando too?
 
I also am curious if jetBlue is planning on moving their OCC out of NYC area too. Didnt they talk about moving it to Orlando too?

Was talk of either consolidating the training center at MCO, or to SLC and consolidating their admin/phone offices/benefits place. Dunno if anything ever came of it.
 
Was talk of either consolidating the training center at MCO, or to SLC and consolidating their admin/phone offices/benefits place. Dunno if anything ever came of it.

SLC was never an option for the SOC. As for MCO, with the cost of rent falling in NYC, I don’t see any move happening anymore.
 
SLC was never an option for the SOC. As for MCO, with the cost of rent falling in NYC, I don’t see any move happening anymore.
Rent? I thought the main reason was that JetBlue were getting a tax cut/relief from NY that was going to expire soon. Florida has some great tax cuts for large companies. And they also provide tax relief based on percentage of military veterans employed. As for NY, corporate taxes are going up, even NYSE is thinking about moving out of state
 
Rent? I thought the main reason was that JetBlue were getting a tax cut/relief from NY that was going to expire soon. Florida has some great tax cuts for large companies. And they also provide tax relief based on percentage of military veterans employed. As for NY, corporate taxes are going up, even NYSE is thinking about moving out of state
In addition to the tax break, the per square footage they have on their current lease was a lot lower than the cost of moving to Orlando at the time as well.

With many businesses leaving NYC, my guess is that NY will do what they can to keep them there.
Let alone, the building won’t want to lose another tennent.
 
With many businesses leaving NYC, my guess is that NY will do what they can to keep them there.
Let alone, the building won’t want to lose another tennent.
WOW! so much faith in NYC and NY state in general.... NYC, and the state, will do everything possible to increased their taxes and chase them away just like they are doing with all the other businesses and just like what they did with Amazon (that was going to be in the same neighborhood as JetBlue is)
 
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