, Britain
A ground handling company at Manchester had the following week's rosters out by the Monday. Nine hundred people across ramp, baggage, check-in and dispatch, shifts allocated, overtime agreed, agency cover booked for the Friday because the Friday was always busy.
On Thursday 15 April 2010 the airspace closed. The rosters did not change, because there was nothing to change them to and because the people on them had contracted hours whether an aircraft came or not.
Nothing came for six days. At the end of it the handler had paid an almost complete week of wages and had nothing to invoice anybody for, because a handling contract pays for turnarounds, and there had not been any.
Six days closed by a forecast rather than by damage
The eruption at Eyjafjallajokull in Iceland put a plume of fine ash into a wind that carried it straight over northern Europe. Airspace across the region was closed from 15 April 2010 and reopened in stages from 20 to 21 April.
The reason it lasted so long is worth understanding, because it explains why nobody could plan around it. The rule in force at the time treated any forecast ash contamination as a no-fly area, and the forecasts came from a volcanic ash advisory centre working from a dispersion model rather than from measurements of the actual sky. There was no agreed concentration below which flight was considered acceptable. It took the best part of a week to establish thresholds with the engine manufacturers and the regulators, and once thresholds existed the airspace reopened.
Something in the order of a hundred thousand flights were cancelled across Europe. Ash returned in smaller quantities in May 2010 and closed airspace again briefly, which mattered to anyone who had assumed April was a one-off.
A handler is paid by the turnaround
Ground handling is a contracting business with a particular shape. You sign with an airline to handle its aircraft at an airport: the ramp work, the loading, the pushback, passenger check-in and boarding, sometimes de-icing and cleaning. You are paid per turnaround, or per movement, at a rate negotiated hard and usually for a fixed term.
There is rarely a minimum volume. If the airline flies less, you earn less, and that is the deal.
The cost base does not have the same shape at all. It is people, and people are rostered weeks in advance because the flying programme is published weeks in advance. Contracted hours are payable. Agency staff can be stood down at short notice, which is exactly why handlers use them, but the permanent core cannot be. Equipment is on lease or on a maintenance contract. The airport itself charges for the right to operate airside, and a large part of that charge does not move with the number of aircraft you handle.
So six days with no flights removes essentially all of the revenue and very little of the cost. That is the arithmetic that made the ash cloud worse for handlers than for almost anybody else in the chain.
Nothing about it was insured
The instinct is that a shutdown of that size must be somebody's insured loss. It generally was not.
Business interruption cover responds to interruption caused by physical damage to insured property. No ash fell on the handler's building, no equipment was harmed, and no flight was cancelled because anything of the handler's was broken. Extensions that cover denial of access or the action of an authority exist, but they are narrow, usually short in duration and often require damage somewhere in the chain. A regulator closing the sky as a precaution is not a covered peril in an ordinary policy.
Contracts did not rescue anyone either. Standard ground handling agreements excuse both parties from performance in circumstances outside their control, which means the airline does not owe you for work that did not happen.
Airlines were worse placed in one respect: European passenger rights rules required them to look after stranded passengers, with meals and accommodation, for as long as the disruption lasted, and that obligation had no ceiling. But that is a cost sitting with the airline, and an airline carrying an unlimited care bill for a week does not become a more generous customer afterwards.
The six days were the shock; the year afterwards was the test
What the closure really did to the handling trade was hand every airline a reason to look again at what it was paying.
Handling contracts run for a few years and then go out to tender, and the tenders that followed a bad year were priced against a customer with a hole in its own accounts. Margins in the business are thin at the best of times, and this was not the best of times.
The tender itself carries a peculiar risk. When a handling contract moves from one company to another, the staff who did the work usually transfer with it under TUPE, as a service provision change. That cuts both ways. Losing a contract removes the revenue and the payroll together, which sounds survivable, and is, unless the overhead behind that payroll stays exactly where it was: supervisors, training, equipment, the airside licence, the office. A handler that loses a large customer and does not shrink its overhead in the same breath has simply reduced itself to the same fixed costs with less to pay them.
Winning a tender has the mirror problem. You inherit people on their existing terms, at a price you bid to win, and you find out afterwards whether the two are compatible.
That is why customer concentration is the thing to watch in this trade rather than turnover. A handler where one airline is nearly half the revenue is not really running a business with several customers. It is running one contract with some extras attached.
Security does not pause because trading is bad
The other fixed cost that cannot be trimmed is compliance. Airside passes require background checks, staff are screened, supplies are controlled, and the regulator tests the system without warning.
Failing a test is not a fine and a letter. It closes the lane or the process concerned until it is put right, and the aircraft your contract says you will handle still arrive during that period.
Where this shows up in the game
Six Days is a historical start, and one of the hard ones. It puts you in a ground handling company at Manchester in April 2010, at the moment the airspace closes, and runs for twelve months rather than eighteen. There is no revenue for six days in month one and the full payroll is payable. One airline is nearly half of what you earn, which is the starting position rather than a twist.
It is scored on cash in the business at the end: finish the twelve months with £600,000, or run out along the way and it ends there. The six days are the shock, but the twelve months are about whether the contracts survived it. Two airlines retender their handling in months five and nine and you bid for them, knowing that losing one transfers the staff to the winner and takes the payroll away with the income. A security test happens once in the run, unannounced, and failing it closes a lane for a week. The Six Days page lists the rules, the objective and the failure conditions.
The seed is fixed at 600014, so the closure, the tenders and the security test land in the same places for everybody, and the scores mean something next to each other. Ironman rules apply: one save, and what happens happens.