qukslvr619

That is an interesting theory, which also brings about my point about flight operations recovery. Around 2004-2005, I used to work at Trans States and it always confused me how United would have so many different carriers on a route, for instance ORDSTL. SkyWest, Trans States, Republic, GoJet, Mesa. At one point UA then made some markets exPlus and the mix/match of regionals seemingly was reduced because of the limited number of E170s and CRJ-700s. I always thought that it was scheduler's nightmare to figure out if UA specified 6x flights in a market, how would Trans States determine of those 6 how many they would operate, and then in a scenario where they determined they had a/c availability for say 2 flights in that market, that then SkyWest would be able to take the remaining 5 flights, etc.

In reality, pmUA would build the schedules with the available aircraft from each carrier, and then that is how the other carriers would fly them. So if there were 15 ERJs from Trans States, 15 170s with Republic, and 40 CRJs from SkyWest, pmUA would build a schedule to cover flights for a particular hub and because of the way that those aircraft would be routed out of the hub, and subsequently flown back into the hub from an outstation, it would end up in a scenario where you had multiple carriers flying a single route. Contrast this with how pmCO used to handle schedules which was specific carriers assigned to specific routes. So if ExpressJet was flying IAHSTL, Chautauqua wouldn't have any of their aircraft scheduled on that route.

I'm getting lengthy, but back to the point of "damaged being dispersed", I can say that typically it was actually easier to recover from Irrops if only a single carrier was flying a route. Case in point ORDSTL. If you had one carrier flying the route, say GoJet, and its for a 1200 departure, if the inbound aircraft that was scheduled to turn to the 1200 flight is delayed, you can recover more quickly because flight ops may be able to reroute another GoJet aircraft to cover that 1200 ORDSTL flight. That originally scheduled inbound aircraft can then be moved to cover a different flight. But if the schedule is such that all of the STLORDs are GoJet with the exception of that 1200 operated by SkyWest (with the inbound aircraft going mechanical and no available spare aircraft), you aren't going to be able to get GoJet to cover that 1200 trip because its a SkyWest pairing. Granted in a scenario with only one regional assigned a particular market, that carrier may not actually have available aircraft to cover it either, but its more of a challenge where you have multiple carriers in a market because aircraft cannot be swapped as easily.