Originally Posted by sullim4

Are you being serious? I'll assume you are, despite your tenure on FT...

You'll notice that AS3 was scheduled to fly on an A321 while 1078 is on a 737-800. That's not a simple swap of flight crews, it would require a pilot and first officer trained to fly on both aircraft types. No one on here has any idea whether such a crew was available, whether the A321 crew came down with COVID, or what. Christmastime isn't exactly a time of year where there are a ton of flight crews on-call, particularly in a remote station like DCA.

I've never heard of an airline that picks and chooses the flights they fly during IRROPs based on the flight number. Next thing you know, we'll end up in that Seinfeld episode where Kramer starts betting on which flights take off on time and what arrives first...