Aircraft of any type DO NOT like being stored for long swathes of time. Whilst they continuously receive some maintenance input during their storage, a machine that sucks a lot of amps and has lots of technical elements/controlling computers and sensors will start to throw a temper tantrum after being grounded for so long.

There is a reason why pilots are always on our guard when we pick up an aircraft that’s out of storage or heavy maintenance, or just hasn’t flown for quite a while, they tend to play up. That isn’t a reflection of the engineering input but rather the fact these machines are designed to spend as little time as possible on the ground. Ground bad, sky good.

Aside from that as mentioned the small fleet size and lots of operation factors, primarily driven by weather of late, don’t allow much in the way of slack. Added to this, some of the fleet seemingly ‘turn on themselves’, that is to say they operate the same rotation for a few days in a row. If an issue or multiple issues with one departures cause a delay out of base, the next few days can be a bit rotten for on time performance.