Originally Posted by
festriaqua
My company (and many others) does not allow more than 2 people from the same department to travel on the same flight on a business trip. This is to avoid missing important meetings when a flight is delayed, or worse, crashes. Having two flights leaving an hour from each other allow teams to keep relatively similar schedules.
interesting point, i'm pretty sure this isn't the reason. The main reason is:
1.) demand is there for 4x dailies, and
2.)
arrival times and transit banks in HKG.
you'll notice ex-HKG the flights to LAX are perfectly evened out...morning, midday, late afternoon, late night. if the situation was as you say, you'd expect to see timings clumped together. They're not.
The reality is CX can't really justify a departure ex-LAX from 5pm until midnight. Because those flights will land HKG in the dead-time between around 12am and 7am. Midnight arrival sucks for terminating traffic (aka, as a resident in HK, zero chance I take this flight, leaving at 5pm still screws me out of half a business day and I can't get dinner in either place), and also sucks for the relevant transit bank flights. You'll miss all Australia, India, Maldives, Colombo, etc, and realistically unless the flight departs spot on 5pm, you also miss
every flight, even including SIN, ICN, NRT and SUB evening departures.
The timing is just flat bad going back to Asia. The dead-time exists to time the arrivals properly