Originally Posted by
mkgrip
It doesn't take 2 planes, it takes a plane and a half. The remaining half is used e.g.during the winter for to those LPA charters that leave HEL early in the morning and come back for the midnight departures.
Yeah, they used to do this a couple of days a week with MD-11s back in the days when the BKK flights continued to SIN/KUL/HKG. Resulting, of course, in all-too frequent delays since the HEL-LPA-HEL requires about 12 hours in the air + an optimistic one-hour layover in LPA.
In my opinion, the pattern would make more sense if they were able to find
a) a sensible continuation point from BKK (I am surprised they haven't)
b) some daily work for the plane ex-HEL during the day
LPA flights operate in the winter months only, and even then they have used wide-bodies only occasionally. I think this season was the first in many years, and only once or perhaps twice a week. That leaves the aircraft idling at least five days a week, and in the summer seven days a week.
Say, they could operate two planes on a daily HEL-BKK-MNL/???-BKK-HEL-LPA/TFS/AGP-HEL rotation, this would make more sense.
Originally Posted by
mkgrip
Besides, if they want to have 2 daily connections, what choice do they have? Unless they can fill the planes with just Finns they need the inbound European feeders, and those come in in two waves, one in the afternoon and one in the night.
Concerning BKK, this is the only destination where they actually can fill the planes with just Finns. As for all other destinations, eg. PVG or PEK, you are quite right. Consequently, I am bewildered that it is BKK where they operate this pattern, because here it makes the least sense.
But I'm sure they've got people at AY doing the math, and if it's worth it using two wide bodies on a single daily to BKK, then so be it.