ROBERT HARDMAN: I’m the first journalist allowed inside Heathrow’s giant new Operations Centre. Here’s what it’s like – and how its boss was asked by the King: Can you stop disturbing my siestas?

The wall is covered with live screens stretching so far that no one person can possibly keep an eye on all of them. One is reporting updates on around a dozen minor incidents.

I see that an ambulance is on its way to check-in at Terminal 3, for example, or that the police are checking an unattended bag in a cafe in Terminal 4. One section of the wall is made up of nine screens simply showing closed-circuit live footage from one platform of the shuttle train running beneath Terminal 5.

There are monitors covering approach roads, fire alarm systems, baggage belts, passport control, electricity consumption, engineering works along with plenty of indecipherable pie charts and graphs. Somewhere in the middle, I spy one solitary screen offering light relief in the form of Sky News.

Mail journalist Robert Robert insider Heathrow’s Airport Operations Centre 

According to Heathrow’s management, this is the largest ‘screen wall’ in Britain – bigger than any multi-screen system you will find at, say, BBC headquarters or Scotland Yard. And this is the first time they have allowed a journalist inside what is the airport’s inner sanctum, to watch around 50 people playing simultaneous games of three-dimensional chess.

All have clearly defined roles, be it working out extra fuel loads for planes which will need to fly around today’s new Middle Eastern exclusion zones or steering a medical emergency team to find a United Airlines flight from San Francisco to Frankfurt which has just been diverted to London because a 70-year-old man has just had a heart attack. I meet key staff, from the woman who had to co-ordinate all the aircraft movements during Queen Elizabeth’s funeral in 2022 to the airport boss who received a personal noise complaint from a Windsor resident. ‘Can you stop disturbing my siestas?’ the King asked him.

Called the APOC – Airport Operations Centre – this huge room controls pretty much everything at our busiest airport – with the exception of what is happening in the sky. Air Traffic Control, based in a giant tower, deal with the stuff overhead. This covers what happens on the ground. And I had been expecting things to be a little more frantic, given that this place has just set a new record.

For this week, Heathrow has just announced new figures which show that it is not only Europe’s fastest-growing airport hub but it is also on course to post the highest passenger numbers in its history. It is not merely back to its pre-Covid level but is comfortably surpassing it. In the first three quarters of this year, the airport has handled 63.1million passengers, meaning that it is now forecast to deal with 83.8million by the end of 2024, easily the highest number ever.

Back in 2008, after Heathrow opened its vast leviathan, Terminal 5, the management pronounced the place ‘full’. That was based on an annual turnover of 66million passengers. But then they kept on squeezing in a few more. Everything then fell off a cliff thanks to Covid but things have now not merely returned to normal. This summer, the airport had the busiest departure day in its history on Wednesday July 24 – 142,800 passengers – a fact directly attributable to what was happening two days later: the opening of the Paris Olympics. It also clocked up the greatest number of arrivals on a single day – with 140,500 landing on Monday September 2, coinciding with the end of the summer holidays.

Thanks to the extra hordes flying in to watch various Taylor Swift concerts, it was the busiest summer season on record – nearly 31million people in total.

Heathrow has just announced new figures showing that it is not only Europe’s fastest growing airport hub, but it is also on course to post the highest passenger numbers in its history

Jack Nye, baggage service manager at Heathrow, which handled 63.1million passengers in the first three quarters of this year, new figures show

Thanks to the extra hordes flying in to watch Taylor Swift’s concerts in Britain, Heathrow has seen its busiest summer season on record, with nearly 31million passengers

Which all raises some rather awkward questions. We have all been led to believe that basket-case Britain is now a pariah state. Certainly, listening to the post-election doom-and-gloom narrative peddled by Chancellor Rachel Reeves, the Tories have left behind an impoverished wasteland bereft of hope. We have also been told endlessly that no one wants to do business in post-Brexit Britain. At the same time, a day cannot pass without a dark warning that aviation is killing the planet, that the Just Stop Oil brigade are ‘on the right side of history’.

On top of all that, the business lobby has always warned that unless Heathrow gets a third runway – which successive governments have blocked – then it is doomed to become a second division also-ran in the world of aviation.

All of which must, surely, point to the slow, inexorable, terminal decline of the UK’s flagship airport. The trouble is, all these pesky passengers will just keep turning up and messing up all these solemn predictions, with the result that well over the equivalent of the entire population of this country will pass through the place this year.

So I have come to see how they deal with all this as Heathrow handles this week’s crowd-booster: half-term.

And it is all eerily calm. Indeed, even when I am shooed out of the room because a ‘blue light incident’ is unfolding – nothing serious, it turns out – there is no sense of anything out of the ordinary.

I have been allowed inside APOC to mark its tenth anniversary. Previously, the airport was run via a network of offices scattered around the place, all doing different things. Then, Heathrow had one of its periodic winter meltdowns and action was clearly needed.

‘We had a horrible Christmas,’ recalls chief operating officer Javier Echave. ‘And we realised that we needed to invest in some greater resilience and we spent £50million on this. We had, I think, 32 control rooms at the time but now everything is centralised into one.’

Heathrow’s chief operating officer Javier Echave, who is in charge of co-ordinating 90,000 employees working for 400 companies at the airport

Born in Spain and now devoted to Britain, Mr Echave has been working at what he calls ‘the city of Heathrow’ for 16 years and is now in charge of co-ordinating 90,000 employees working for 400 companies. Of these, around 6,000 staff work directly for the airport. He is still determined to keep pushing the passenger numbers up despite the fact that the airport cannot actually squeeze in any more flights – thanks to planning permission which has capped them at 480,000 annual ‘movements’. Nor is there any prospect of a third runway, though the owners – a consortium comprised mainly of Qatari, Chinese, Canadian and Saudi institutions – continue to badger the British government in the hope of getting one.

‘We still have the ability to create more capacity within the two runways we have,’ says Mr Echave. ‘The airlines are putting on bigger aircraft, but we also need to make sure the aircraft are more full,’ he explains.

I learn that the average plane in and out of here carries 220 people and that, on average, they will be 80 per cent full which means that, in theory, Heathrow could accommodate another 20million punters each year. In other words, it is not inconceivable that, before long, the airport is processing 100million souls in a calendar year.

How has this happened? Mr Echave points to two main factors. First, he says, London is still ‘super attractive as a destination, a place to connect and a place to do business’.

Second, he says that, unlike many other airports in Europe, ‘we did not use the pandemic to violate our commitments to our people’ and there were no compulsory redundancies. ‘We didn’t burn social relationships as much as some other businesses and so, in our attempt to bring people back, we struggled less.’

So what about the damage all this extra flying must be doing to the planet? Mr Echave points out that ‘sustainable’ aviation fuel is now beyond the experimental stage and will account for more than ten per cent of consumption in five years’ time. He also had long talks with the King on the subject, back in his Prince of Wales days, since Heathrow is part of the Sustainable Markets Initiative set up by Charles.

‘I have met him many times to talk about embedding sustainability in business,’ he says. ‘You get those deep blue eyes looking you in the eye and he says, “Tell me the truth”. And you do. I am very inspired by him. I told him he was like Spider-Man. I grew up on Spider-Man who would say, “With great power comes great responsibility”, and that is what the King does.’

The King also joked with him about the noise of the air traffic which flies over Heathrow. ‘Knowing I am Spanish, he said, “Can you stop disturbing my siestas?”’

For residents, the noise usually depends on which of the two runways is operating in which direction. At a certain point each day, Heathrow switches the incoming and outbound traffic from one runway to the other, to spread the load. I am surprised to learn that incoming planes make more noise than take-offs, because of the sound generated by friction with the landing gear. For Windsor, the greatest noise comes when planes are coming into land on the north runway.

Just Stop Oil protesters block the departure gates at Heathrow’s Terminal 5 in August this year as part of their ongoing campaign against the fossil fuel industry

Airport operations manager Amanda West, who was on duty on the day of Queen Elizabeth’s funeral on September 19, 2022

While I’ve got Mr Echave, I want to ask him about the number one gripe of every passenger: all that faff at security. He says that the airport is investing £1.1billion in new-generation scanners which mean laptops and liquids can sail through without the need to unpack your luggage.

Other things are beyond his remit, notably passport control, though he is not unduly worried about the draconian upcoming EU rule that every non-Schengen Area arrival must give their fingerprints. ‘That will be done at European airports, not here, so the impact will be quite minimal here,’ he says, while acknowledging it could mean hideous delays at the other end.

It’s time for a proper tour of the APOC room itself. Although it overlooks the north runway, there is almost no noise, thanks to some very thick windows. Aside from the airport’s in-house boffins, all the agencies have representatives in here – the police, Border Force, air traffic, the fire brigade (which has to be anywhere on the entire Heathrow estate inside 90 seconds) and so on. As soon as anything untoward happens – from snow to a demo to a rail strike – all the key players are now in one place.

I meet the duty airport operations manager, Amanda West, who will be the central point of contact for the duration of a 12-hour shift. She happened to be on duty on the day of the Queen’s funeral. ‘It was amazing how silent an airport can be when it needs to be,’ she says. Not only did all the planes and terminals come to a halt for the allotted two-minute silence, but planes were being diverted away from the various funeral processions and services throughout the day. On top of that, the airport’s VIP services were dealing with the greatest influx of heads of state that Britain had ever seen (though even that was surpassed by the Coronation).

‘It was their busiest day ever,’ says Amanda, adding that they were spared one challenge. ‘Air Force One doesn’t land here,’ she says, explaining that there isn’t room for all the helicopters and motorcades which usually accompany it. ‘The US president always goes to Stansted.’