Jonette Gregory has spent nearly 40 years tracking Alaska Airlines' planes.

She’s not just an aviation enthusiast. Gregory’s job is to make sure Alaska’s fleet is operating smoothly, to identify snarls in the making before they interrupt a flight and to make recommendations about what to do if something unexpected happens.

She monitors the weather to “see where my potential issues are for the day,” and keeps track of planned and unplanned maintenance. On a screen that looks unreadable to the average layman, crammed full of colorful horizontal lines, Gregory can see every route the SeaTac-headquartered airline is flying that day.

The job is always changing, an attribute that Gregory said is her favorite part of the role.

Gregory is one of 270 employees in Alaska’s Network Operations Center, a 24/7 central command center that those on the inside call the airline’s nervous system.

There, employees track Alaska’s 1,200 daily flights and make on-the-fly adjustments for weather, maintenance, crew schedules and other unexpected disruptions. One mishap can have a cascading effect through the airline’s entire schedule for the day, leaving those in the NOC, as Alaska calls it, to find a quick fix.

Lately, those unexpected disruptions have had widespread impacts on Alaska's flights and planning. An IT outage grounded Alaska’s fleet in October. A government shutdown led federal regulators to mandate flight reductions in November. A pipeline leak stopped the flow of jet fuel to Sea-Tac, leaving Alaska and other carriers to find workarounds until it restarted Tuesday.

How Alaska handles those widespread disruptions and more routine hiccups, like winter storms, is especially important during a busy holiday travel season. Sea-Tac could see 900,000 travelers over the Thanksgiving holiday, with Alaska generally accounting for more than half of the airport's passengers.

Bret Peyton, managing director for the NOC, said every situation has a different personality" that changes the "ground-level decisions" about how to respond.

"That doesn't mean we can salvage every flight," Peyton said. "But it does mean that we keep the guests' greater good, and what the operation looks like in two, three days from now, right at the front of our decision-making."

Here's a look inside the office building that keeps Alaska flying and how the airline handled its recent disruptions.

The setup

Alaska’s nervous system — located in the sleek HUB building next to Alaska’s corporate headquarters in SeaTac — is surprisingly quiet for a command center that is tracking and reacting to dozens of planes and data points.

Mounted TV screens display The Weather Channel, announcements from the Federal Aviation Administration and a livestream from some of the airline’s planes, particularly those making scenic landings in Alaska. Red ticker clocks display time zones around the world and Zulu time, a 24-hour universal time standard often used in aviation.

Some desks have vertical light fixtures, featuring red and green bulbs stacked on top of one another, reminiscent of what you’d expect to see in a 911 call center. The lights flash red when a call comes in and green to signify which desk picked it up. They look like sirens but don’t make a sound.

“It’s really calm in the chaos,” said Chelsey Janes, the director of Bridge Operations, one of the teams in the NOC responsible for making decisions about what to do when something unexpected happens.

The NOC looks at scheduled flights up to seven days in the future. It is split into several work groups: two that monitor schedules for flight attendants and pilots, respectively; one responsible for maintenance; another that determines how best to load aircraft with people and cargo; and another that plans each aircraft’s route before and during flight.

That group, called dispatchers, coordinates with the pilots, crews and air traffic controllers. It is the largest team at the NOC, Janes said.

The Bridge group that Janes is a part of takes all of that information from other work groups and makes a “business decision” about how to move forward if something unexpected happens.

That can mean delaying a flight, swapping out an airplane, asking for a different crew to avoid scheduling troubles or canceling a flight altogether. Usually the Bridge team has to make decisions within a few minutes.

The NOC is responsible for Alaska and SkyWest, a regional carrier that operates flights on behalf of several other airlines. Horizon Air, a regional subsidiary of Alaska Air Group, has its own command center a floor below in the HUB. Hawaiian Airlines, which Alaska acquired last year, has yet another command center in Honolulu.

The airline has a “playbook” for how to handle irregularities, said Peyton, the NOC managing director.

When the situation could impact a large chunk of Alaska’s fleet, the airline convenes an “irregular operations group” and runs through a checklist: What are the facts, ignoring any rumors or speculation? What data are we seeing? What are some plans for how to move forward?

"That's a bit of a sausage-making exercise at the beginning," Peyton said. "We iterate on ideas … (and) come up with a plan of action after listening to inputs … And then you do it again."

"You keep taking those inputs," Peyton continued, "because one thing's true with irregular operations — they never stay static."

Alaska always tries to avoid what Peyton called an "ugly cancel," or when an airline faces something so unexpected it has to cancel a flight after passengers have already arrived at the airport.

“We take it very seriously,” Peyton said. “Everybody on that airplane has a reason to be on that flight, probably a very good reason. We want to make sure we get it right.”

The IT outage

In October, an IT failure cut off the information loop that employees in the NOC rely on to make decisions. Peyton related it to a car breaking down.

The system has safeguards in place to make sure employees aren't making decisions based on incorrect data, Peyton said. But during the October failure, the data simply stopped coming.

"My flight planning system won't function, and my weight and balance system won't function, and you know, it's like my car won't start," Peyton said. "It was news that I'm not going to drive this car."

The outage disrupted several streams of information, but it hit the system that keeps track of pilots and flight attendants the hardest, said Jason Berry, Alaska's new chief operating officer.

The outage lasted long enough that the airline's information became "stale," Berry said. That meant it couldn't rely on the old information to make decisions about flights getting ready to take off, which led Alaska to ground its fleet for eight hours.

It was the second IT failure Alaska faced this year. In July, a hardware failure at a data center grounded the airline's fleet for three hours.

After the second incident, Alaska hired the consulting firm Accenture to assess its entire IT infrastructure. It has not yet released the findings.

On the operations side, Alaska plans to increase "drills" to practice manually collecting and sharing information in case of an IT failure, Berry said. That means turning back to phone calls, pen and paper, and fax machines.

Alaska already does practice drills for all sorts of disruptions, from wildfires and earthquakes to IT outages. After a CrowdStrike outage in 2024 disrupted some airlines, Alaska devoted one of its twice a year "tabletop" exercises to addressing a technical failure, Peyton said.

Now, after its recent outages, Alaska will "drill more often and more rigorously on our paper processes and manual processes," Berry said, to make sure employees are able to react quickly if a system goes down.

The shutdown

In November, Alaska and other carriers faced an unprecedented task.

Amid a government shutdown that stretched to 43 days, the FAA mandated airlines reduce flights at 40 major airports, including Sea-Tac. It was an effort to ease the burden on air traffic controllers, who were working without pay and facing high staffing shortages.

The FAA told airlines to reduce operations over the course of a week, eventually cutting 10% of flights. But in Alaska’s NOC, employees were proactively planning how to cut 12% of flights, Gregory said.

Alaska never needed to execute that plan. The government reopened and the FAA reversed course, returning operations to normal over a few days. At its peak, Alaska canceled 8% of flights, following the FAA’s mandate, Berry said.

The directive came during Berry's first week in his new role — and it came quickly. Berry's team heard rumors that a mandate to reduce service might be enacted. Then the senior leaders of major airlines got on a call and the FAA's order was enacted within a few hours.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has faced criticism for ordering the cut, with some Democrats accusing him of using air travel as a political pawn. Berry said he trusted the FAA's decision.

"It's easy to play Monday morning quarterback," he said. "But this was a great case where the entire aviation industry came together to help bring down that risk the FAA saw."

In deciding where to cut, Alaska used a scalpel instead of a hatchet, Berry said. It focused on high-volume routes where it would be easier to rebook passengers, like routes from Seattle to Las Vegas, which Alaska flies several times a day.

It also took advantage of that time to have a "maintenance holiday, Berry said.

When the FAA lifted its order, he added, Alaska was running as normal within 48 hours.

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