Inside United Airlines’ 24/7 Chicago operations center managing daily flights

DENVER – If you’ve ever boarded a United Airlines flight, there’s a good chance your journey was quietly guided by a massive team working behind the scenes, far from the airport, and even farther from the public eye.

That team is based at United Airlines’ Network Operations Center (NOC), a 24/7 command hub located just outside of Chicago, where specialists oversee nearly 5,000 flights a day.

The facility houses more than 2,000 employees across 26 departments, from flight dispatch and crew scheduling to meteorology and aircraft maintenance coordination. 

Together, they monitor and manage United’s global operations, including departures and arrivals in major airport hubs.

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“What you see in front of you is really where our global operations is controlled,” Harel Magaritz, managing director of NOC daily operations, said during a behind-the-scenes tour of the center.

Magaritz says the job is all about constant coordination and expecting the unexpected.

“It’s about knowing that anything around the world can happen at any given moment,” he said. “All the things that come up that could potentially disrupt a flight — our job is to collect that information and then communicate it out to the field.”

That includes everything from mechanical issues to weather delays to crew reassignments.

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One of the most critical teams inside the NOC is the in-house meteorology department, led by Nathan Polderman, senior manager of meteorology. His team is responsible for issuing weather forecasts across United’s network, and flagging any events that might delay or ground flights.

“In some cases, we’ve had two or three hubs with thunderstorm activity in the same day,” Polderman said. “So you can imagine that makes the weather team very busy.”

Each day starts with two forecasters overnight, ramping up to four meteorologists during the day, according to Polderman. Their forecasts are used by flight dispatchers to decide how or if a flight should proceed.

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“Turbulence, icing, bad weather at the destination airport, if anything’s going to happen to that flight, the dispatcher is going to coordinate that,” Polderman said.

Magaritz said the goal is simple: keep flights moving safely and smoothly, often before passengers even realize a problem exists.

“It’s about that comfort level of knowing you’re not out there by yourself,” Margaritz said. “You’re not just buying a ticket and hoping you’ll make it to your destination. There are entire teams and thousands of people working in the background.”

United officials also emphasized how essential it is to receive real-time updates from airports across the country in order to keep operations seamless across the network.

A United Airlines leader says the job is all about constant coordination and expecting the unexpected.