Hi gang. After shamelessly lurking for some time, I finally signed up.

As for the aircraft routing question......

At it's most rudimentary, a/c routing is a function of marketing, maintenance, and crew scheduling. Marketing decides what aircraft they'd like to use for a given market, obviously limited by the fleet types we have and the capabilities of each - i.e.- no 737's on transcons.

Given marketing's desires, maintenance tries to balance the flying time of a given fleet type. From their perspective, the ideal would be that all the aircraft within a fleet type accumulate flight time equally, since maintenance visits are often based on that. They don't want a number of 767's, for example, all coming due for heavy maintenance visits at the same time.

Crew sked looks at putting crews on the planes - if marketing wants to use an A321 for the 7am departure from stumpwater to PHL, will there be a crew in place legal to fly it - both pilot's qualified on the Airbus and the right number of F/A's.

As you can imagine, this is something of a give & take process before everyone is satisfied.

To top it all off, there's the last minute complications - mechanical problems, weather, etc - that throw a monkey wrench into all those carefully laid plans.

So knowing where a specific aircraft will be tomorrow, much less next week or next month, is next to impossible except for the 330's and 767's - during the summer season, most of them will pass thru PHL in the afternoon.

Jim