Originally Posted by
drewguy
Yeah, thought maybe that’s what was going on. But I guess the next question is whether departure sequencing depends on the specific plane or just the flight number. If it’s the flight number then I would think they could swap frames and simply move the departure back up (but still late, just “less delayed”).
another possibility that ocurred to me is the inbound crew on the earlier flight might have been done for the day and the new crew for the 5:15 flight couldn’t start earlier to take the 4p flight, even with a ~30m delay.
I'm not sure if G7 swaps crews at DCA but it wouldn't surprise me given the proximity to IAD and the crew/MX base at RIC, but generally for any specific flight it is just one piece of a larger puzzle for both the crew and the frame -- it may be that that frame needs to be in a different place downline for a specific reason and swapping frames may upset that apple cart (e.g. 4413's (N576GJ) next stop after EWR is RIC (where it will overnight then fly IAD-YOW-ORD) -- perhaps it is due for maintenance and if you plopped 4414's current aircraft (N548GJ) on that line of flying you may not be able to legally get N576GJ to/from GSO for the flights that N458 is currently scheduled to fly (EWR-GSO-EWR-RIC-ORD) ... or maybe this is the N476 crew's "go home day" and moving things around would make it more difficult to get them back to Richmond.
Just a really weird example of how a small change can upset the apple cart: A couple years ago I was (supposed to be) flying MCO-CLE. Due to thunderstorms our inbound aircraft diverted to TPA (IIRC). This created a problem: When the aircraft left wherever it came from there was an inspection/maintenance check that needed to be completed within 2 cycles. As originally planned, you would have landed in MCO with one cycle remaining, flown to Cleveland, and the CLE MX team would have done whatever needed to be done overnight. However with that "bonus" landing in TPA it was now due in MCO right then -- no cycles left to get us to CLE. I can't remember if they were going to pull mechanics to do the inspection right then or found a different airframe to swap but a couple hours into the delay I moved myself to MCO-(IAD or EWR)-CLE leaving an hour after I made the change... And even with that delay and an added connection I still beat my original flight home by more than an hour.