A couple of thoughts re the recent AC trip experience involving mechanicals, maintenance and delays.

In terms of OTP

Since January, I've flown 7 x AC 17 and 9 x AC 18. Few were on time. The AC 18 delays were almost all caused by late AC 17 inbound. This week's AC 18 had enough mechanical and maintenance issues causing its own delay. I am not sure why the AC 17s are delayed. It leaves YVR at approx 11:00am and in some cases, the aircraft is actually already on the ground in YVR, not inbound from elsewhere. And yet, I've been on flights with the non-inbound aircraft were not ready to go and so we sat. I spoke with crews about this but won't post here.

When AC 17 is late to TPE, the pressure is on the ground crew etc to turn it around and get AC 18 going. But it's not the fault of the TPE ground crews.

I also wonder why I am standing at the gates in YVR waiting to depart on AC 3 to NRT, but the inbound is late from ICN or PVG or elsewhere.

The sense I get from a variety of sources and experiences, is that the planning of the turn-around time is too short, especially on the long-haul TPACs. I do not work for AC. I do not work at the airport. But like many here on AC FT, I spend a lot of time on these TPAC routes and I find it baffling.

I am well aware that on some winter flights, we had winds as a challenge, but that is not always the reason.

My other AC TPAC routes are also late, but HKG and NRT have some different issues.


Mechanicals and Maintenance

I have my own opinion of the challenges AC faces with birds that go weird or fleet constraints, leading to long departure delays and a large number of missed connections. I may write about it in another thread.


Finally, looking at this trip which involved 3 different domestic cities and 2 different Asian cities, ALL FOUR of our AC flights had mechanical and maintenance issues. ALL FOUR! The first one was delayed 35 minutes while they had to sort out the bleed air, the outbound TPAC had air conditioning issues and at one point, the captain indicated that if it wasn't solved by a certain time, the flight would be cancelled. We left an hour late. Not terrible, but still. The return AC 18 was a mess of varying proportions and of course we misconnected in YVR. My onward transcon was also delayed due to maintenance plus connecting pax.

And for good measure, the previous TPE trip had the transcon go mechanical with hot brakes (that aircraft eventually got to YVR 11 hours late !) We were able to get on other flights to our destination but then AC 18 was 2.5 hours late, which caused us to misconnect and so the story goes.
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