After months of delays on JK051/SK9953 often arriving only a little earlier than the now scheduled 01:00 arrival at ARN I noticed that JK is making a major schedule change and will not overnight their A320 at ARN from the 28th of October 2006 and will go to 7 day a week service adding Sat/Sun.

They instead opt for a early morning MAD departure 06:40 arriving ARN 10:20 with just a 1 hour turn around departing ARN at 11:20 arriving MAD at 15:10.

One thing I guess I like about the change is that it could make for some interesting 23 hour connection possibilities. I wish SK would start having 23 hour connections on the website as KL and LX have done for years. SK is ideal for them as they let you check bags 22 hours before flight.

It now allows Nordic connections to help fill the flight down with the later departure time.

Could SK possibly start a ARN MAD direct flight leaving ARN early AM?

The IB/AY code shares to MAD are very successful and has great load factors and fares have been very high this year on that route. It has also had a much better on-time record.

Well, one bad thing about this must be the onward connections to eg. LPA and TFN and the returns from those destinations???

I thought of that directly as well. I think the problem has been that while JK has had an ontime gaurantee on domestic routes JK 051 has been delayed waiting for crew or aircraft. They must have realized that a 01:00 arrival is unrealistic at ARN at this time. A 01:00 'redeye' from MAD arriving at 5 am would have been better than that for me.

The 03:00 JK from LPA arrives just 5 minutes prior to the 06:40 scheduled departure so even that wont work.

There is definately room for an afternoon flight from BCN or MAD with SK or JK just for that reason.

I tried to make a booking ARN-LPA/TFN-ARN on random dates over the winther season, and there are no available connections according to the JK-site.
Funny, as Spanair started out as a carrier for transporting scandinavians to Spain for the holidays! How many leisure travellers go to Madrid and back in the winter?
IB has some pretty good A340 c-class deals MAD-TFN-MAD, so maybe I will look in to that

You have a lot happening in the canaries. You now have Air Madrid entering the market. Santa Barbara Airlines from Venezuela is stoping there along the way and I have heard Vueling may enter the market. The charter carriers have made it alot easier to book one-way fares as well to and from Scandinavia.

I noticed that IB is flying Air Atlanta 747s even with IB cabin crew along with the A340 and a few 757s.

Maybe JK/SK are looking at directs or will do a 1 stop from the Canaries not requiring aircraft change. IB does that to AGP from CPH with stop in MAD. They could just have mini-hub connections from all the islands before departing for ARN with stop in MAD for the 06:40 departure.

It will be interesting to see how the new schedule works out for JK, but my guess is that they'll change it again, for several reasons:

-No domestic connections possible for the return flight without staying overnight in MAD
-No overday trips possible (at least some go to MAD just for the day)
-Very unattractive departure time for tourists - with a return flight at 06 am you get nothing out of your last day and get quite a lot of your last night ruined too, if you have to get up like at 4 am (hey - not all people like to party all night and go straight to the airport...)

I think JK has underestimated the number of tourists on their flight, who either connect to domestic flights or just stay a weekend etc in MAD. They will loose all those passengers to other airlines - and probarbly not to SK, since the SK return via CPH on the afternoon almost never have any good fares on interesting days.

Yes, the new schedule is so stupid that it has to go or more flights added.

Yes it will be interesting to see what changes are to come. I am hoping SK is involved in some way. This does give a feeder maybe to possible Asia flights from ARN.

The current 08:15 ARN departure does not allow Swedish connections for the most part.

Overday trips must be very limited to Spain as nothing gets done in a day here and I dont think many Scandinavians in winter are so interested in the quick turnaround as well and have nothing against overnighting in MAD.

The current schedule obviosly does not suit the ARN market. Transportation is limited from ARN after 23:00, car rental agencies not 24 hour and you are treated almost rudely or with suspicion when arriving at a ARN hotel around 02:00 or later.

The cost savings must be great. They can always use the aircraft for another long same-day flight with no down time and then for a late-night or early morning Canary Island run. They save cost of having crew overnighting in ARN. Costs to overnight at ARN. They must save on weather related delays and de-icing as well.

IB and AY are very successfully running basically the same scedule in reverse.

duplicate

Swedes who live a country are used to overnight at ARN - I don�t sleep in airports
I usually do ARN-JK-MAD-JK-TFN-BT-GMZ easily in a day. Now they force me to look at OW... I still think something will happen at the same time as they load prices for the winter season - should occur in mid June judging from previous years.

It makes sense that JK should think of the Spanish marketplace as well as it is there that they have the competitive advantage. AY does almost no marketing in Spain for instance leaving that to IB.

I am not looking forward to my first 0100 arrival at ARN next week.

PUH, it�s back to normal. JK52 is now dep 08.15 for winter... seems they are changing schedules every three days at the moment... or maybe they read here

Yes. I wonder about them reading here. I find it odd that they cut the OSL connection from ARN on the USA site 2 days after I posted it here.

But what about the 0100 arrival for JK51... I was just checking some other JK flights at this time and see they have it arriving at 0055 now. Unacceptable for a limited service airport like ARN.

At least they still show 7 days a week.

Has been funny to see this week. When you checked the lowest fare it was coming 115 to 151 euros. But then when checking business restricted they were coming 93 to 108 euros.

SHHHHHHH! Don�t tell `em


PS. If the 01.00 ARN arrival changes 5 minutes every three days it will be back to normal before winter comes!

It seems that AY changes it flight to become nonstop HEL-MAD starting October 28th.