Underutilized aircraft
 

I'm meeting someone on 1603 from IAH to AUS this evening. Went to the PDA site to check on where it's coming from and I see it's prior flight is 240, which arrived from AUS at 6:40 AM today. So it appears it's sitting all day at C-30, then flying back to AUS where it will sit all night. It's ship 343, a 737-300.

I'm surprised CO has aircraft idled like that. I wonder how many other planes hang out like that all day.

Just be very thankful they aren't sending that bird to EWR and back today (or most days for that matter)!

-RM

i'm sure they have their reasons.

management is compensated, in part, by the performance of the company. performance wouldn't be very good if there were scads of aircraft just sitting around all day.

i have a hunch that management has a model that shows them the best deployment of aircraft so that there is redundancy in the system (some aircraft are held back/aren't used to the max in case of irregular operations).

Could have had mechanical issues and they were fixed in time for the next IAH-AUS flight.

AUS-IAH shuttle flights are interesting to watch, I've ridden an empty 753 to AUS, but mostly it's 739s.

I suppose it might also be possible that they are sitting out the -300 series jets as much as possible since they require a lot more fuel than the -700/-800/-900 series.

All of our aircraft are on different maintenance cycles...... there are hourly checks which have to be done after a certain number of hours, cycle checks, daily checks, weekly, monthly, etc.....

It isn't uncommon for an airplane to run for three, four, five days straight and then be brought into the hangar for one of its checkups. Anytime you taxi by the maintenance hangars there in IAH or EWR you will see a handful of aircraft pulled into the bays getting their checks done.

This particular aircraft is apparently pulled into the barn for the day getting its wax job, lube job, etc......or an engine changed because one failed. Gotta be one or the other...... :D

And several years ago when I was a Gold I sat in Y on an oversold 753 on IAH-AUS on a Sunday night. They needed something like 15 volunteers to fly the next morning, and even with 24 F seats, not all Platinums were upgraded. The guy next to me, in a middle seat in the exit row, was a Platinum traveling on a K fare.

Makes sense, but it's quite a coincidence that in the evening it went out from the same gate it came into in the morning.

There are only so many gates...