CAL PHL FLYER

Any guesses when FlyI will call it quits?..It seems like a slow death..Ive heard these are the last days.

ClimbGuy

probably till jan 3 or 4. their holidays flights are selling for top dollar.

greenery

Independence Air has jammed up the runways at Dulles for over a year. They had hundreds of small regional jets with a dozen passengers waiting to take off slowing the Boeing 747-400 flight with 450 passengers who had to wait in the same line.

I would like fewer flights at Dulles but bigger planes. Independence just clogs up the runways!

DHAST

If you're going to make inflamatory statements, please try to be a little more accurate. I'm almost positive that the most RJ's they had was 88, far from the "hundreds" of planes you say they have. The flight schedules of the 747-400 with 450 people were so limited it is almost inconsequential. The carriers that operated them flew them into (and out of) IAD once or twice a day.

gleff

Besides, how do you fill a 744 at IAD? With connecting traffic. Fewer small planes in and out of IAD means were large planes in and out of IAD.

DCA's perimeter rule, incidentally, delayed the development of IAD as a major hub for a decade.... by limiting DCA to short flights it had more of those than it otherwise would have (holding slots at that slot-controlled airport constant), which meant fewer short flights at IAD, which meant not enough connecting traffic.

IAD as a strictly-O/D market doesn't support very many of those 744s!

greenery

Isn't more logical from an airtraffic control perspective to have fewer flights with larger planes? Independence Air had to many small planes all taking up valuable runway space.

sts603

Exactly - Independence had 300 daily departures at its peak. With 88 planes flying hour trips - that's a lot of daily turns.

Plus, DC is a massive O/D market and yes, 747's can be filled.

Not to mention, little, if any of Independence's traffic likely connected internatoinal. UX has that market covered. Without Independence they could fly bigger planes on some routes if the fares stay down.

DHAST

Yes, but I'm sure we all know that airlines tend to schedule their flights based on market demand, not air traffic control logistics. Look at flight schedules bewteen DC-NY and SoCal-LAS and tell me those flights are going out completely full on profitable fares. Just because you have demand to fly 450 people between two cities does not mean you should put a 744 on the route. You may find that it will go out quite empty if it is trying to reaplace 4 737's.

Please elaborate. The runways at IAD are over 10,000 ft long. The CRJ probably uses 1/4 of that for takeoff and maybe half of that for landing. That means there's a lot of runway left over.

The air traffic bottlenecks occur when the airlines schedule too many flights during a specific time period. There's a fixed (depending on weather) amount of flights that can arrive and depart in a given hour; scheduling more flights than the airport can handle in a given hour is what creates the bottlenecks.

IAD's only real peak crunch time is around 5pm. At any other time of day, the rest of the airport is a relative ghost town, meaning that the "runway space" is left empty and there is nobody to use it.

greenery

I have spend almost an hour on the taxiway at Dulles waiting for 10-15-20 small planes waiting to take off. To me if there were less flights but larger planes there would not be as long a line to taxi and hit the runway.

Independence Air has increased the number of take offs and landings at Dulles and caused delays for everyone.

gleff

Really? They operate fewer flights than when they were Atlantic Coast...

mid

Hogwash!

Increased air traffic has increased flight delays, not Independence Air.
Weather increases flight delays, not Independence Air.

"greenery" isn't citing any particular data to support his argument, so he's arguing from ignorance.

I wish the trolls from UAL would go back to their own board.

DHAST

greenery,

Apparently your knowledge of such matters is limited. Of those 10-15-20 small planes waiting to take off, how many of them were corporate jets? I'm betting half,

Second, the amount of time it takes to get from the gate to get off the ground is generally predictaqble. If, after an hour of sitting in line for takeoff, you arrived on time or close to it, the airline actually already knew there would be a long wait for departure.

I've always thought that at fortress hubs, airlines should do themselves a favor and stagger their departures a little better so they're not releasing 30 flights and once and then complaining it takes an hour to get the last flight off of the ground.

DHAST

ACA operated about 120-150 daily departures out of IAD and I think close to 180 out of ORD.

prhs1989

Hate to break the news to you, but every hub now has just about as many small planes flying as they do mainline. Have you been to Newark lately. All I ever see landing there are Continental's Expressjets. They are also having the same problems at ORD with too many express flights operated by United and American. The sad news is that those little "puddle-jumpers" have become just as vital to airlines as the mainline flights, so get used to seeing a lot more little planes.

DHAST

Prior to the transition to FlyI, ACA operated more flights in and out of IAD than UA did. UA's flight schedule was controlled by UA. I would gather that not much has changed over there, and that UAX still has more daily flights than UA. Outside of some FL markets and BOS, I'm hard pressed to think of any other cities that UA serves with mainline jets up and down the east coast.

Everybody talks about the "expensive" RJ's and the "cheap" mainline jets, but the sad truth is that the airlines are forced to sell their mainline seats cheaply to get them filled.... Low CASM with empty seats doesn't work too well. Airlines MUST operate with some sort of schedule to attract pax... flying once a day with 200 seats is not equivalent to flying 4 times per day with 50 seats.