serfty

Posted on AFF:

Jmr007

Jmr007

Yooohooooo

superflip

Yikes! No time to connect to/from points (much) further east in the USA on those Sunday BNE-LAX & vice versa routes.

Aspen

VA has five 773 aeroplanes how will they schedule an additional four flights a week ?

DCF

The scheduling causes me a problem.

I tend to fly back from LAX on the Friday night flight, arriving at Brisbane on Sunday morning. I usually try to be back in LA from points further east by Thursday and spend a night at Santa Monica, then use a late checkout to have a day to relax by the sea.

Under this new schedule I either leave LAX on Thursday, and am back by Saturday morning, or on Saturday which means I arrive early Monday. My time-honoured use of the (Australian) weekend in Southern California at the end of a trip falls over.

And worse, the new Sunday flight back from LAX is basically a daylight flight.

And that is a problem. As it is, I always try to stay up most of the night before leaving SYD or BNE for LAX so that I sleep at the right time.

But the Sunday morning departure ex-LAX is going to be tricky too, because it really requires you to stay awake the whole flight.

DCF

There is still the connected problems that the aircraft sit on the tarmac at LAX for 13 hours, but also leave Australia far too early in the day, so you don't sleep, get jet-lagged and then arrive at LAX at 0700, leaving you the choice of waiting 9 hours to check-in to an LA hotel or else get even more exhausted connecting onwards to the East Coast.

Why not just operate:

BNE 2100 LAX 1715
LAX 2330 BNE 0630+2

Sure, you'd lose a lot of same day connections beyond LAX. But taking them with the current schedule is far too exhausting to allow work the next day anyway.

BNE_VA_Hawk

If you do that then you're leaving the planes on the tarmac all day as well - just this time it's at BNE rather than LAX.
The extra 4 flights they get is by minimising the LAX layover time with the LAX-BNE Sunday services and then taking one of the 773's off SYD/AUH.
At the moment they need 4 x 773's to run BNE-LAX & SYD-LAX on a daily basis. Adding MEL-LAX comes at the expense of SYD-AUH no matter which way you look at it, the question was always going to be how much frequency they want MEL-LAX to be. Without taking something from BNE it could only be 3 return flights a week. By taking 1 return flight off BNE, you then get it to 4 returns. By making the schedule adjustments to BNE-LAX on Sunday, there's enough flex in the schedule to allow MEL-LAX to go to 5 returns a week.

The issue will be when there are scheduling disruptions like what happened in July/August with flights being cancelled and having to accommodate passengers in both directions. VA ended up running additional flights (minimising turnaround in LAX) to make up the shortfall.

serfty

VA have issued a reaccommodation policy for this.

https://www.virginaustralia.com/cs/g...tion160920.pdf

Basically anyone affected with BNE flights can be rebooked FOC via SYD/MEL.

Also, those booked to from MEL via BNE/SYD may be able to be rebooked on a direct flight FOC, although the policy is a bit unclear on this.

shuuy

You could fit in a BNE-PER-BNE tripper. But then again filling ~300 seats...

alpenrose

Hello:

Planning a trip from LAX-ADL-MEL-AUK-RAR-NAN-LAX I have never used VA before, but am unable to connect to their website (?). What can you tell me about the VA flight LAX-MEL ? Would like a premium economy, or business if possible. Any and all info will be much appreciated! Is it always so difficult to get connected to their website?

serfty

There are quite a few recent reviews around as the 777's have all just been refurbished.

bosboy73

Sux. We were on the Friday flight. Moved from dep Fri 11:50 PM to Sat @ 11:15 AM. No can do. DL award ticket so had to be re-accommodated on DL to SYD and then connecting on VA to BNE. Leaving 1 hr earlier and getting in 3h40 min later. So the total damage was 4h40. Not thrilled as we lose a whole morning in BNE and will need to skip the drive to Byron Bay as we are heading on to Cairns that same evening. Oh well. Worse things could have happened.

CPMaverick

Fantastic! I am very tired of flying through SYD or BNE to get to the USA. Can't wait to start booking MEL-LAX-XXX for my east coast US flights.

I couldn't disagree more, connecting to the east coast it is much better to just get on with it rather than overnight in LAX, you lose a whole day. Sure it's never fun to do this long of a trip, but arriving east coast in time for a quick dinner and straight to bed is perfect. I usually get about 10 hours sleep and am in fine shape for work the next morning, maybe even getting up early.

Now, for arrivals to LAX maybe it is a bit tough. But way, way better for connections. And as long as you can sleep or take something to knock yourself out, it works out fine.

Nugget_Oz

It's not really going to make that much of a difference for connections, even to the east coast as your going to have at least 3 connections available out of LAX to major east coast hubs.

As for LAX arrivals the afternoon is fairly quiet for TBIT arrivals.