Originally Posted by
mtofell
I also noticed that AS lists the tail# here sooner than the flight tracking apps do (makes sense since this is probably where they get it from) which is nice for checking wifi and being able to inform my employees and others whether or not I'll be reachable while in the air (to/from Hawaii where only some planes have over-ocean wifi).
Beware that aircraft swaps are fairly common especially for flights originating at hubs. I would say that in my flights originating at SEA this year, the aircraft has swapped from what was showing the day before about 50% of the time. You can see the planned routing on Flightaware by entering the tail number. Most often the swaps have happened either when the original aircraft had long ground time in Seattle and gets sent to perform an earlier flight (which may have originall been scheduled to use an aircraft that is now arriving late), or the inverse case, where the aircraft assigned to my flight is coming in late and they choose another airplane. That doesn't happen as much at outstations, by the time the aircraft is enroute, it's unlikely to get swapped out at the outstation. One exception to that is at airports close to GSO (where AS has outsourced maintenance.) They will sometimes rotate aircraft to/from GSO.