Continued issues with East Coast equipment going mechanical
#16
Join Date: May 2013
Location: SEA
Programs: AS MVP Gold 100K
Posts: 2,021
The only way to deal with this is have sufficient spare planes and crews on the west coast. Just know that its going to be eight hours before a spare could even get to an east coast location. That being the case AS is going to have to get much better at passenger care and have some standard plan in place to deal with stranded passengers.
#17
Join Date: Dec 2009
Location: BUR/LAX
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When you fly transcons on an airline with no base / infrastructure east of Interstate 5, getting stuck at eastern outstations is part of the risk you accept. The mechanicals, I don't know what they can do about; they happen to every airline, and AS is not going to park a spare at Logan waiting for something to go wrong. The dismaying slow and stupid response to the BUF diversion a few days ago was something else again. Alaska doesn't seem to have go-to plans for dealing with distant service / pax care emergencies.
#18
Join Date: Apr 2003
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#19
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Now, at SEA, JetBlue is as much a stranger in a strange land as AS visiting BOS.
#20
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yep, turn the scenario around imagine B6 SEA-BOS diverting to, say, Helena MT following an inflight emergency
#21
Join Date: Apr 2003
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#22
Original Poster
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#23
Join Date: Apr 2003
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The point is that Helena and Bozeman are very close so if they had to divert they could get to Bozeman within minutes and could divert there and have staff which know their computer systems and could help passengers with flights going both East and West. Any way you slice it B6 is better off having crew bases on both coasts. AS is choosing to save money and are hoping for the best. Thankfully the best happens more often than not but to think that random crews from Boston are going to fly in and fix any AS problem has in the midwest as mentioned in the diversion thread is just ridiculous.
#24
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no, the point is that many FAA-approved emergency procedures require the flight crew to land at the NEAREST suitable airport for reasons of SAFETY ... availability of airline staff NEVER enters into consideration
I'll dig up the link later, but a few years back a DL 757 operating JFK-LAX lost an engine shortly after starting descent (~150 miles out) ... using your logic, they should have risked being written up -- or perhaps fired -- for violating the FARs (or, as a minimum, company policy) and just continued on to the destination where they have maintenance facilities, rather than subjecting the passengers to a ~4-hour delay while Ops rustled up a 739 and crew to ferry everybody back to LAX (if memory serves, they deadheaded the jet from LAX)
yes 4 hours isn't 30, but sometimes s#!t happens when recovering from things going pear-shaped ... the FIRST order of business is safety
I'll dig up the link later, but a few years back a DL 757 operating JFK-LAX lost an engine shortly after starting descent (~150 miles out) ... using your logic, they should have risked being written up -- or perhaps fired -- for violating the FARs (or, as a minimum, company policy) and just continued on to the destination where they have maintenance facilities, rather than subjecting the passengers to a ~4-hour delay while Ops rustled up a 739 and crew to ferry everybody back to LAX (if memory serves, they deadheaded the jet from LAX)
yes 4 hours isn't 30, but sometimes s#!t happens when recovering from things going pear-shaped ... the FIRST order of business is safety
#25
Join Date: May 2013
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Incident: Frontier A319 near Yakima on Dec 14th 2011, unruly coffee pot
#26
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as promised/threatened here's the link ... DL459, 19 Aug 2015