Originally Posted by
cesco.g
Probably more of a scheduling decision, than "let's make sure we don't need to serve a hot meal" issue.
Originally Posted by
FlightNurse
I really dislike when airlines do this, really, you can't add 2 minutes to the published flight time...
Having worked in scheduling, I can honestly tell you that I never encountered a situation whereby catering would call us up and have us make changes to flight times so that we wouldn't have to serve meals.
That being said adding 2 minutes to published flight time seems trivial but when you factor in crew costs (increase your scheduled block hours), potentially blow connections (because incoming flt wouldn't meet MCT), show up as a longer trip duration in GDS (perhaps not appear at the top of a screen when a trip is being booked), adjust gating/flow issues at capacity constrained or slot-controlled airports, etc. 2 minutes over a month of a schedule can add up to millions.
The bottom line is the schedule is made, catering probably receives it, dumps it into Excel, runs a few macros to capture exception markets, and then its assigned meal codes, and then put into GDS. I'd like to think that someone would go in and see that a IAHXXX trip that had lunch departing at 1200 now only has a snack because its leaving at 1202, and change it back....but unfortunately I don't think they are that proactive unless its an exception market.