So Many Charters?
 

There are a lot of unusual visitors to DTW today (due to WX at ORD)... which prompted me to take a close look at the arrivals/departures at flightaware... and I happened to come across CO1901... a 738 bound DTW-MCI. Then I started plugging-in more "19XX" flight numbers... and sure enough, I found a whole bunch of flights between random city pairs... some looked like sports charters (i.e. a recent CLE-PTK flight), but I had no idea CO operated so many charters... it looked like almost every day CO has some combination of 738/733/753s invested in charter operations. Just an observation, but it surprised me... especially when we talk about how CO could use some bigger birds... you'd think they'd savor those 753s for high-yield routes... or is chartering really that lucrative?

What CO's really short on is longhaul widebody capacity. Most of these charters use domestic fleet, with the exception of the 777 for some military charter and the upcoming flights to Seattle that many FTers are booking.

An airline has to have some backup aircrafts sitting around. Adding a flight on a few occasions will not degrade reliability too much.

I wouldn't be surprised to see a CO 777 here in PHX again if either the Texans, Jets or Giants are in the Superbowl in February.

I posted this last October about some of the charters CO run:

http://flyertalk.com/forum/showpost....7&postcount=22

Right now:

Indians - mostly 738, occasionally a 752 or 733.
http://flightaware.com/live/flight/COA1901

Orioles - also 738, occasionally a 737 or 733.
http://flightaware.com/live/flight/COA1907

Yankees was 1908 till end of June. 738 or 752.
http://flightaware.com/live/flight/COA1908

This one looks like the Texans. 753 to PHX last weekend:
http://flightaware.com/live/flight/COA1917

The Bucs, a 753 just like last year:
http://flightaware.com/live/flight/COA1919

1930-33 seem to be deadhead flights to serve the charters.

Not all 19xx flights are charter. For example, 1941-45 were used the last week for extra flights to CUN/CZM/MID etc to evacuate people.

Sometimes you can book on a 19xx flight. Like the upcoming 9/7 SEA-EWR 1991 and 9/9 EWR-SEA 1990 on the 772:

http://flyertalk.com/forum/showthread.php?t=720894

Anyone know what happened to the Yankees' charter? Being a big fan, I occasionally tracked their charter flight but have not seen anything since the All-Star break...

The Yankees also use StarJet out of Canada. Maybe they switched after the break and that is why they are now only 5 games out????

I'm in CLE right now, and we saw a NW 742 parked beside the terminal area, I'm wondering what she's doing here, I had assumed a charter but I have no idea...

Most likely Browns to DEN.

It is for the Browns - NWA has the charter contract this year and the team is large until cuts start next week.

They will be heading for DEN shortly.

The Indians charter.

While the consensus here seems to be that it was for the Browns... and it very well may be... keep in mind that with this insane weather we're having in the Midwest, planes are all over the place right now.

ORD closed for a portion of yesterday afternoon, and lots of planes ended up scattered across the Midwest. At DTW, we got a BA 744 LHR-ORD, a UA 777 LHR-ORD... and an LX 332 from ZRH. In fact, the LX plane never made it out last night... and it sat at the DTW charter terminal all night until it made the jaunt to ORD at 7:00 tonight -- delayed AGAIN due to the second-round of storms passing through that shut-down DTW for a while.

So, again, there are planes scattered all over the Midwest this week from weather diversions.

Any info on this flight on FlightAware? StarJet doesn't even show up in the airline search.

The NW 742 wasn't a diversion. It flew in as NW9832 from MSP last night.

It then flew as NW9972 to DEN this afternoon.

The Browns are playing the Broncos in Denver this Saturday.

I am 100% certain this was the Browns charter.

Let's hope for two 777s, one for the Jets and the other for the Giants ...