intuition

Finnair naturally does not think about it like this, because they think they are serving CAN and FUK as O/D. They are seeing all the asian destinations as the final destination for a europeean traveller (or the sole origin of an asian traveller).
I am just saying that there might be other ways to look at it. They already have pulled back once from CAN....

ffay005

AY's wave system, with incoming Asian flights in the early afternoon and outbound Asian departures around 5 pm, works very well from the perspective of schedule planning.

This is how their narrowbodies operate:

- most stay overnight in Helsinki, but some start their day at outlying airfields upcountry and some fly overnight to Russia, with arrivals at HEL around 7 am

- around 8 am, they head for Europe, carrying Finns "suoraan Euroopan aamuihin"

- these flights turn around and land again at HEL around 3 pm, carrying passengers that connect from Europe to Asia via HEL on the 5pm wave

- the planes leave for Europe again around 4 pm, carrying passengers flying in from Asia, connecting to Europe

- those flights return to HEL at around 11 pm, carrying Finns "illaksi kotiin"

- and again, some flights leave for upcountry airfields and minor Russian destinations around midnight

This means that the schedule is very well suited not only for the Asian connections both ways, but also for bisnetic [sic] people in Finland, enabling same-day return travel to Europe for those routes where AY offers two dailies. The schedule works well for Finnish tourists, too. For travel from Europe to Finland, the schedules aren't very good, but I suppose such travellers are a minority, anyway. This wave system is very efficient also in terms of aircraft utilization.

The second, a lot more modest, Asian wave leaves Helsinki just before midnight (offering connections from those 11 pm European arrivals) and land again before 7 am (offering connections on the 8 am departures to Europe). BKK, HKG, SIN, I believe.

There is also another minor wave system in progress with the JFK flights. It used to work for the AA-operated ORD flights as well, but now that AY operates the ORD route, they offer a different schedule. Also for MIA, the connetions at HEL aren't too good.

The JFK flights land a little before 9 am and leave a little after 2 pm. After the arrival of the inbound, there are connections to the Nordic and Baltic capitals as well as WAW and SVO. All these flights make a quick turnaround and come back just in time before the JFK flight leaves, offering seamless, albeit in some cases a little tight, connections to JFK.

I wonder if other airlines have schedules that are equally well coordinated with connections in mind. At least when I book HEL-Europe-XXX on a variety of airlines, it seems a complete hit or miss whether you get a good connection or not.

Courmisch

Pushing the schedule forward by a couple of hours might make the departure from Asia more convenient, including for O/D. But I guess it would require letting the planes overnight at a number of European outstations, increasing costs and killing evening flights to HEL. This is very disadvantageous because of the time zone difference between Western/Central Europe and Helsinki.

That or landing back at HEL at 1am, which sucks big time IMO.

Either way, that does not seem like a very sound decision from an economical or marketing perspective.

mosburger

How about the majority of passengers on a longhaul route being Chinese, Japanese or Korean (Cantonese, Singaporean)? Would they still prefer to be treated according to European travellers preferences?

What I personally like and actually want is to fly to Asia earliest at 4-5 pm from any European destination and the same on the way back.

Breakfast, meetings and then (business) lunch either way, not wasting daytime hours flying.

I do not consider myself superhuman and realize the day after arrival is half lost anyway. So no big interest on what time the arrival is, as long as connections can be made and the day before flying is "normal and productive"

Courmisch

Again, the point is that having red-eye both ways is impossible with only one plane per Asian destination. It would either require nearly halving the plane utilization, which would be very uneconomical, or requiring an overnight in HEL for all passenger to or from Europe.

The Singaporean and Hong-Kongese already get their red-eye flights both ways. Singapore is a special case though because the plane can physically not make the round-trip within 24h. I heard (not sure) that Hong-Kong is also a special in that the plane gets some quick maintenance at HKG.

This is not a matter of my personal preference for European flights. I would prefer to have flights to Europe late morning or mid-day rather than early morning. There are hardly any with the current schedule: basically only the ultra short-haul and Finnair's top destination: Paris.

No. This is just the reality of Finnair's scale, business model and geographic and economic constraints: the big wave is roughly in the middle of HEL airport's operating hours, in the afternoon, between the two round-trip for Central/Western Europe feeder flights.

I prefer to fly by day because it is much less exhausting. Even more so on business, whereby my employer ends up paying for lost working day.

The majority of passengers may be based in Asia, but the majority of passengers is also in Economy class, where you cannot sleep well. And even in J, the flight time is too short to sleep properly (except BKK and SIN). Also, the majority of passengers is not bound for HEL, and would probably not want to overnight in HEL on their way (back) from Europe to Asia, or pay a steep extra to cover for the lower plane utilization,

intuition

Maybe I shouldn't prolong this, because we are clearly talking past each other. I'd just like to highlight a few things (and this is no way intended as misrepresenting anyone's posting. My bolding and snippeting)


Ie, to me, this is a case between thinking like a European catering to European need vs. thinking like an Asian and catering to the Asian need. Sure - the afternoon asian wawe allows for connection to europe in the afternon and from europe around noon. But does it allow for connections in Asia?


Finnair is looking to grow. Which market will this growth come from? Europe or Asia?
And will Finnair grow and become financially viable when European leisure travellers force airlines to rock bottom with 60€ Thailand flights?


And maybe this is it. Finnair's "Asian strategy" is perhaps completely based on European needs, and the competitiveness is therefore totally linked to the banks timed to the EET timezone. If future growth is in Asia and Ex-europe prices will plummet then it simply cannot survive.



Disclaimer - I'm a big fan of optimisation and high utilization, and I do think the current bank system is clever. I am merely pointing out that it may soon reach a point where it has survived itself. (A walk through HEL airport at 4pm says it already has)

intuition

Well, they are already pushing the new flights on the swedish site, with FUK at 530€ and CAN at 633€.
An like you say, they seem a lot more confident in the CAN route. They have release a moderate number of upgrade seats to FUK and none what-so-ever on CAN. A very random and limited search showed FUK had awards seats in Y, and CAN didn't.

mosburger

Yes indeed.

CAN for example, is a major CZ gateway to Southern and Central China. Yunnan, Guizhou, Guanxi, Henan, Fujian etc. Even Xinjiang might be easier to reach from there than CRK due to CZ routings.

A codeshare on selected CZ flights from CAN to those destinations and smart social media marketing on Wechat and Weibo could bring some share of the provincial businessmen and holidaymakers that are increasingly interested in Europe both for business and leisure.

intuition

This is not unthinkable. While CZ is in scary team, there have been meetings between the two. Also, CZ has a lot of capacity to Australia and prices that would either make the flyer or the codesharing airline very happy.


However, AY would have to compete with AF as a feeder for those connections. AF who incidentally operate a daily flight CDG-CAN, connecting-friendly timed with red-eyes both ways...

CDG-CAN 23:20 16:55 (+1)
CAN-CDG 23:05 05:50 (+1)

intuition

By the way, MCT at CAN is 2:30 for a domestic to international (and 2:00 for I-I). The AY flight leaving at 10:00 can be fed by several international CZ flights, including AKL, MEL, BKK, DPS, MLE, SYD, LAX, KTM. However, no CZ domestic flights arrive before 07:30, thus there are no legal connection options.
If you can get on the China Postal airline, you can connect from XIY though

So travellers need to either be CAN locals or stay overnight.

CAN has no rail access to Guangzhou, so to catch a departure at 10:00 you need to take one of the first busses in the morning, say 06:15. If you are lucky at that time of day, the ride is under 2 hours. If unlucky, then you can always fly the next day. Oh, sorry, it wasn't even a daily AY flight...

Courmisch

I think timing for good Asian connections does not make sense if it compromises European connections. HEL is much too small of an O/D of its own. Finnair needs the feeders to/from Europe. They also need to keep the morning flights from HEL and the evening flights to HEL interesting to keep the whole business viable.

I am not saying this because I am a European living in Europe. As an HEL-based flyer myself, I would benefit more from convenient Asian connections.

mosburger

Now, this looks quite like I'd wish AY to fly as well.

Departures from HEL maybe around midnight and return flights from Asia around 1AM in order to avoid too early arrival.

ffay005

I don't know if we are, actually. I'm just pointing out that the AY stragegy lies very heavily in a super-efficient use of planes. The strategy is good for Finnish travellers to Europe and for travel between AY destinations in Europe and AY destinations in Asia.

You are quite right that the strategy is not very good for Asian connections. I'd like to think it is a deliberate choice and not a mistake or pure serendipity. They probably make the most money by offering what they do now – if they changed their schedules to better serve intra-Asian connections, they would lose more than they have to gain.

I for one do not like night flights at all – for some reason, it's easier for me to rest and even sleep on a daytime flight. Also, the effects of jetlag increase massively on night flights. That's just me and it might well be that people in general would prefer redeyes.

But with the efficiency they want and need to have, the current schedule and wave system is probably the only thing that works.

BTW, AY used to have a mini-wave at 8 pm. PEK and DEL at least. I believe it's not there anymore, right?

intuition

OK ^


Some of my thoughts are -

* at what point does the competitive advantage (of being able to serve destinations in under 12h) become a drawback? As in the CAN-example, AF has greater distance to fly so they are already forced to use 2 planes. So they can chose better slots for the longhaul, and they can certainly use the residual time of those birds to fly a shorter route. I'm pretty sure they are not running the route with a deficit. And having better slots on both ends make it possible with decent connections at both ends, which can't be bad for economy.
Will AY ever reach this point, or should we just draw a map with a 4800 miles limit from HEL, pick all cities that has no European service but could sustain one on O/D-traffic only?


* But the way, the distance HEL-HKG is shorter than HEL-NRT. Scheduled flight-time back and forth to HKG is 20h35, seemingly below what is needed for 1 day turnaround. (HEL-NRT-HEL is 20h00)
Yet NRT can be served with 1 plane, while HKG "demands" 2. I guess there are other factors too.


* Can AY really grow if they are held back by 12h returns? Sure, all of China can be served within this time limit, and other OW options to China is extremely limited. Can HEL airport really accommodate say 10 more longhaul flights departing around 1600?


* A350 has a (ever so slightly) higher normal cruise speed than A340. So technically A350 will reach some 200 miles further in the same time. And theoretically, mach 0,85 should shave some 45 minutes off of the HEL-HKG-HEL flight time (assuming they are doing the normal mach 0,82 today - I suspect they are flying slower on this route due to current schedule)


* If this 1 day turn around really is key to the overall economy for an airline, airlines would/should have pushed for quicker planes. But the whole industry have asked Boeing and Airbus to construct better "mpg" planes. At least Boeing proposed to build faster planes and got a clear "NO" from airlines.


* On a route where 2 planes are needed, plane utilisation would increase a lot if they managed to do 2 daily. I assume HKG could easily sustain 2 daily (and they sometimes fly AY61/62) but they chose to open CAN instead. (Again, I love the destination, no complaints there).


* And maybe Boeing is right, when they say hub-and-spoke is old-fashioned. They claim the future is only O/D traffic, and airlines will instead fly directly point-to-point. (That statement assumes airlines will have a multitude of different sized planes to be able to serve thinner and fatter routes, or a multitude of small independent airlines operating outside alliances,

WilcoRoger

HEL-NRT vs HEL-HKG

It may be shorter great circle distance (by 18 miles ), but is it so IRL? Thinking about Chinese air-corridors not neccessary following great circle, whereas the Russians let fly over Siberia more or less "straight"