econometrics

Did HEL-JFK last Thursday, and the J cabin was *maybe* 30% occupied. Didn't look behind the curtain at Y. My colleague had the rear J cabin all to himself.

aztimm

I was on it a few weeks ago (Jan 10 to be specific) and the biz cabin was completely full. The FA told me that there was 1 seat open in coach. My HEL-SIN flight was a bit more open, biz was maybe at 70%.
Have had similar experiences with UA/AA flights... Traveling PHL-MUC once in early Dec the entire aircraft was full, then on the return a few days later not even half full. You just never know.

econometrics

True. My JFK-HEL on 20 Jan (a Saturday) was 100% full in J.

And yes, back to the original theme of this thread... 4-5pm departures from the East Coast TATL are no bueno. This is what I like about being DFW-based. Even though there are a few 4pm departures, you still have a couple extra hours of flight time to get some decent amount of sleep. (Though I usually opt for the 7:30pm or 10pm flights to LHR for this very reason).

dkc192

+1. The last time I lived in the northeastern quadrant of the country (including ORD), my rule was no eastbound TATL departures before 8pm, as I'm a late sleeper to begin with. This basically forced all my TATL itineraries to go through LHR. Now, for my second stint in the northeastern quadrant after a few years on the west coast, I've only taken one TATL--a 10pm IAD-LHR--so we'll see how long I hold myself to my rule!

econometrics

It really is tempting to get on an earlier TATL to land in Europe between 6-8am. But... man I always land having barely slept doing those. Unless I have a nice long connecting flight (e.g. to TLV - 5h), I don't like doing that. I would rather arrive in Europe via LHR between 3-6pm, have a nice dinner and hit the sack.

GotCalcio4

Good to know. I was looking for it about a week ago and didn't see it for several date pairs this summer, so I assumed it had been dropped. It probably hadn't been loaded yet.

GotCalcio4

I feel your pain. Back when US used to offer like 13x daily between DCA-PHL, it was easy to build a connection into any PHL bank. Now that the route is only 3x daily, it's much more difficult, and I'd imagine that the earliest TATL departure bank likely requires very early departures from DCA and long connection times in PHL, which is a bummer.

LINDEGR

Cargo is likely a rounding error in the revenue attributed to this flight.

dkc192

+1 to this!!

iadisgreat

So it seems like most of the European flights are achievable with an afternoon connection from DCA, but I don't know why they wouldn't all be. DCA is a large market (with plenty of money to spend and desire to travel) for AA and they are trying to flow traffic through PHL - do they really expect passengers to take a 7 hr connection?

Unless they just want us to go through LHR via another hub...

nutwpinut

When I first saw this title, I thought they were TATL flights in the morning like 8am. I love those morning flights to LHR.

I liked earlier TATL flights when I lived in Europe. It allowed me to get to work close enough to on time that it wasn't a problem for my boss.

JPG3392

Last August I booked a one-way AA award flight DCA-PHL-MUC for travel in June 2018. I was scheduled to leave DCA at 3:30 PM and arrive at MUC at 8:50 AM the next day, with about two hours on the ground at PHL. A month or so ago the PHL-MUC departure time changed as you indicate, and AA has rescheduled me to leave DCA at 8:24 AM and wait a bit more that seven hours at PHL before the scheduled departure for MUC.

I'm actually pleased to arrive in Munich about two hours earlier, since I plan to move on to Innsbruck by train as soon as possible. But I haven't accepted the schedule change yet, because the flight is still several months away and I'm hopeful that in the meantime AA will change its DCA-PHL schedule to provide a better connection for afternoon departures.

GotCalcio4

For your sake, I do hope they modify the schedule or perhaps add an additional midday flight, however the DCA-PHL schedule has been pretty consistent over the last year (with the exception being some swaps in aircraft types, as I see now all flights are on E175s, whereas they used to have an E190 that operated once per day).

As I mentioned, pre-merger (when the market was probably over-served), there were both 6:00 and 6:30 AM departures, in addition to a 7:45/8:00 AM flight (varying depending on the time of year), which enabled you to connect to the first bank of early PHL departures, especially those to the west coast, which are now no longer options from DCA. There were also flights at 11:45AM and 1:45PM, which would connect you to the early bank of TATL departures, depending on how comfortable you were with your connection time at PHL. I would usually opt for the 11:45 AM, as the 1:45 PM flight only provided an hour on the ground at PHL and typically wouldn't sit well with me, considering that TATL flights board 45 min prior, etc.

The 3:30 PM flight also used to be operated by a mainline 319, and would always be packed with TATL connections and the F cabin often full with paid J fares. The flight would return to DCA at around 5:45 PM. It looks like this pair has been replaced by E175s, which is just fine by me, as they continue to offer 12F seats instead of 8 on the new 319 config.

Considering that PHL has some unique TATL destinations that aren't served via any other hub (such as ATH and MUC), those are destinations that are essentially unreachable now without a connection at LHR or a ridiculous 7 hour connection in PHL. Whoever thought of this was really not thinking, as DCA is not only a hub, but many, many DC-based AA flyers are flying TATL through PHL. My annual trip to ATH every summer is in paid J and was always on US/AA. It looks like they'll lose this business from me this year.

Ldnn1

A more likely explanation is that 'whoever thought of this' was in fact thinking, and well aware of the point you make, but also aware of the multitude of other competing factors at play in building the schedule, and decided that the current solution was the best one overall from the resources available.

No scheduler can ever produce a perfect schedule. It's all a trade-off. But undoubtedly they have a lot more data than those of us here, to help them make those decisions.

PHL

For the longest time it was 2 BA and 2 US flights during peak Summer months. My guess is that by going to 6 total, with the BA/AA alliance that they will be able to funnel a lot more traffic through PHL instead of JFK.