What is the point of an aircraft swap?
#1
Original Poster
Join Date: Jul 2008
Location: MCO
Programs: Southwest Rapid Rewards
Posts: 791
What is the point of an aircraft swap?
Thursday night, I was booked on Flight 805 from BDL to MCO with a stop (but no plane change) at BWI. About halfway into the flight, the captain informed us there would be an aircraft swap at BWI, and the three of us continuing passengers would have to deplane, and get on the new one. The entire flight crew - captain, co-captain, and FAs, had to swap as well. He further informed us that the existing plane would be returning to BDL.
Given that the two planes are identical as far as number of seats.... what is the reason for this? If they needed a plane to go back to BDL, why not just use the plane that we had to switch too, rather than making an entire flight crew and 3 passengers go from one terminal to another? The new plane had no continuing passengers from its original itinerary when we got on board (the 3 of us were allowed to board first, after the pre-boards).
As we were taxiing, the captain got on the intercom again and apologized for the aircraft swap, and even said "Yeah these things don't make a lot of sense to us either."
Can anyone shed light on this? There's obviously something I'm missing....
Given that the two planes are identical as far as number of seats.... what is the reason for this? If they needed a plane to go back to BDL, why not just use the plane that we had to switch too, rather than making an entire flight crew and 3 passengers go from one terminal to another? The new plane had no continuing passengers from its original itinerary when we got on board (the 3 of us were allowed to board first, after the pre-boards).
As we were taxiing, the captain got on the intercom again and apologized for the aircraft swap, and even said "Yeah these things don't make a lot of sense to us either."
Can anyone shed light on this? There's obviously something I'm missing....
#3
Join Date: Feb 2008
Location: Nashville, TN
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I have had this to happen on a couple of occasions, and since I use a quasi-hub at BNA as my home airport I see this from time to time. It makes more sense than you might think.
Let's suppose that a plane has unplanned maintenance issues and must be repaired. Southwest has the opportunity to do several things with the people on that flight. They can make them wait untold hours for the plane to be fixed. They can cancel the remainder of their itinerary then try to find them seats on alternate flights.
Or, they can also bring up a replacement aircraft from Dallas or somewhere else to replace the plane out of service. While the plane is getting there, they start a rolling plane change. Everyone from flight #1 is moved to a new gate and aircraft while everyone waiting at that gate gets a new gate and the thrus are moved when they get there. Rinse and repeat until the new plane gets there and the process ends. The end result is that a few passengers are inconvenienced by gate changes or moving thrus, but everyone leaves nearly on time or a few minutes late and the mass confusion of rebooking a half plane load of connections or thrus is avoided.
The fun part is if you are like me and get to the airport real early. You may get to watch this process. A whole mass of people will get up from the gate, move to the new gate en masse, and a new group will arrive to replace them. The process is quite fascinating and it gets everybody out in a timely fashion.
Let's suppose that a plane has unplanned maintenance issues and must be repaired. Southwest has the opportunity to do several things with the people on that flight. They can make them wait untold hours for the plane to be fixed. They can cancel the remainder of their itinerary then try to find them seats on alternate flights.
Or, they can also bring up a replacement aircraft from Dallas or somewhere else to replace the plane out of service. While the plane is getting there, they start a rolling plane change. Everyone from flight #1 is moved to a new gate and aircraft while everyone waiting at that gate gets a new gate and the thrus are moved when they get there. Rinse and repeat until the new plane gets there and the process ends. The end result is that a few passengers are inconvenienced by gate changes or moving thrus, but everyone leaves nearly on time or a few minutes late and the mass confusion of rebooking a half plane load of connections or thrus is avoided.
The fun part is if you are like me and get to the airport real early. You may get to watch this process. A whole mass of people will get up from the gate, move to the new gate en masse, and a new group will arrive to replace them. The process is quite fascinating and it gets everybody out in a timely fashion.
#4
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Night Vale
Posts: 1,872
A couple of possibilities. BDL most likely only has on-call contract mx. MCO has real SWA mx folks. Big difference in cost. If you can avoid it, you want to get the airplane to a mx base to be fixed or at least a location with swa mx facilities and people.
The aircraft can operate safely with some systems inop - this is called the minimum equipment list and is negotiated between the carrier and the FAA. Whatever is broke is written up in the logbook, and the clock starts to tick as to how long the aircraft can operate before it must be fixed. So maybe there was an MEL item that needed attention. An engine cannot be MEL'd.
Or maybe the aircraft was on its way to El Salvador for heavy mx work and was being positioned, or maybe it was on its way to Paine field to have some armor plating and rivets installed, and so was being positioned.
And I am sure there are other possibilities....
The aircraft can operate safely with some systems inop - this is called the minimum equipment list and is negotiated between the carrier and the FAA. Whatever is broke is written up in the logbook, and the clock starts to tick as to how long the aircraft can operate before it must be fixed. So maybe there was an MEL item that needed attention. An engine cannot be MEL'd.
Or maybe the aircraft was on its way to El Salvador for heavy mx work and was being positioned, or maybe it was on its way to Paine field to have some armor plating and rivets installed, and so was being positioned.
And I am sure there are other possibilities....
#5
Join Date: Sep 2005
Posts: 1,028
As others have suggested, the exact reason(s) the aircraft swap could have been needed are numerous and varied. I was off on Thursday, and therefore can't give you an exact reason for your specific flight, but I'll give you another example based on a recent experience. (I'm a dispatcher in the OCC, located in the Dallas HDQ, where such swap decisions are made, and then communicated to the station-level operations where they are executed.)
Aircraft are complex mechanical vehicles, and sometimes (not often) items can break. Rather than arbitrairly ground an aircraft for any failed item whatsoever, there's a FAA-approved document called a minimum equipment list (MEL) that dictates what can be inoperable ("inop") and what (if any) restrictions must be imposed. If an item isn't listed in the MEL, it's a "no-go" item that must be fixed before further flight. As an example using a car, if the car had the windshield wipers quit, one wouldn't necessarily "ground" the car by keeping it in the garage, but instead limit its use to only when it's not going to be raining. Likewise if one's headlights were out, i.e. limiting it to daytime use. Inop brakelights? That'd be a no-go item in any conditions.
The most common MEL restrictions when it comes to aircraft are daytime/nightime operations, or ones that are weather-related, when it comes to the presence/absence of atmosopheric icing conditions, or the ability of the aircraft to make ILS approaches to the lowest landing minimums that are possible.
With all that said, the situation that I had was a flight that was scheduled to operate PHX-LAX, and LAX was forcasted to be near landing minimums in coastal fog. The flight was a "though flight" coming into PHX from HOU, and the LAX passengers that got on in HOU were supposed to stay on during the stop in PHX. I had already released the paperwork for the PHX-LAX flight with aircraft having no deferred MEL items on it. While enroute HOU-PHX, the aircraft had an item fail that (per the MEL) required it to be operating for the next leg PHX-LAX, due to the fog in LAX.
The three basic choices at that point would have been to (1) Fix the item at PHX; (2) Cancel the PHX-LAX flight; or (3) Swap the aircraft in PHX and route it to another destination where there was no fog. If the repair time is too long, or if the cancellation wouldn't have passenger protection on other flights (everything else booked full), then swapping aircraft is sometimes the best choice, which is what we did.
The crew of the "other" aircraft coming into PHX (the one that would now operate the PHX-LAX flight as a part of the aircraft swap) might be having their own "through flight" interrupted, and most crews can readily understand the need for most aircraft swaps. The need for some swaps is sometimes much less obvious, particularly if more than just two aircraft are involved in the swap, or the need for the swap is to head-off a problem several flight segments "downstream" of where the swap is taking place. In any event, with 550 aircraft in the fleet, a crew certainly knows what's going on with their aircraft, but awareness/knowledge of what's going on with the other 549 isn't automatic--the big picture as it were--which is what we look at.
Sorry for the length, and I hope that answers your question.
Cheers...
#6
Join Date: Oct 2009
Location: ATL
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These are all great explanations and make perfectly good sense from a passenger's perspective. What surprises me is the Captain's comments over the intercom stating "these things don't make sense to us either". It conveys a lack of confidence in WN's Ops Management from the flight crew.
#7
Join Date: Sep 2005
Posts: 1,028
These are all great explanations and make perfectly good sense from a passenger's perspective. What surprises me is the Captain's comments over the intercom stating "these things don't make sense to us either". It conveys a lack of confidence in WN's Ops Management from the flight crew.
Additional alternatives might include (1) A particular aircraft swap indeed doesn't make sense to them (not having the "big picture" I mentioned earlier, or maybe due to a multi-aircraft swap); (2) Their statement is a simpler, quicker, and non-technical explanation of the situation (let's face it, they are busy up there); or (3) They are commiserating with you for the delay. Sometimes it's a combo platter of all three...
The bottom-line (for Customers and crews alike) is that when something like an unscheduled aircraft swap occurs, it's being done for a reason, and a good one, although that reason might not not be as readily discernible to crews or to local ops folks. Despite some assumptions to the contrary, all airline employees are not fully interchangeable in that each knows 100% of every other employees tasks and what goes into them. It'd be like going into a hospital and asking the first person one sees (say, an admissions clerk) a complicated question about a surgical procedure, or conversely, asking a surgeon about admissions paperwork and insurance hoops. We all have our specialties, and while we endeavor to explain the rationale for our decision making to others, there isn't always time to, since we usually have other pressing operational demands on our time, especially if some of the other usual culprits (bad weather, ATC delays) are giving us a busy day..
Cheers..
Last edited by OPNLguy; Sep 29, 2012 at 6:53 pm
#8
Join Date: May 2006
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#9
Join Date: May 2005
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....and that's the continuing beauty of flying SW.....with the relatively identical fleet, these sort of swaps are possible.......as opposed to when I'm stuck in ATL on DL and we are waiting for another exact aircraft of the dozen kinds that DL flies!
#14
Join Date: May 2012
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Are you sure they were swapping the same plane??? There are different types of 737s.
There could have been a problem with this plane...
or they looked and saw they needed to do maintenance on this particular aircraft and by flipping the routing between these two aircraft this plane would then be able to go through to one of its maintenance hubs for repairs.
The other issue is plane availability...not just for your route...but for other routes.
In Southwest "hubs" such as BNA, BWI, MDW, DEN, etc the also likely have an extra plane or two there just in case.
The may have known a part needed to be replaced and with their repair crew there they could do the work in 1-2 hrs or so....instead of causing a delay they just flipped planes.
With southwest, unlike other airlines, there is more cascading effects on arrival time stats if there is a small delay in one location.
A solution to this is sometimes flipping planes because they have already been prepped and loaded a different aircraft so they can have a quicker turnover than if the crew stayed on the same plane.
One time I was on a plane that got flipped and when we got to MDW and then the new gate they were ready to board the aircraft thus saving a potential 20 min delay. Us carry over poassangers were allowed to board first but they already had As in line to board.
There could have been a problem with this plane...
or they looked and saw they needed to do maintenance on this particular aircraft and by flipping the routing between these two aircraft this plane would then be able to go through to one of its maintenance hubs for repairs.
The other issue is plane availability...not just for your route...but for other routes.
In Southwest "hubs" such as BNA, BWI, MDW, DEN, etc the also likely have an extra plane or two there just in case.
The may have known a part needed to be replaced and with their repair crew there they could do the work in 1-2 hrs or so....instead of causing a delay they just flipped planes.
With southwest, unlike other airlines, there is more cascading effects on arrival time stats if there is a small delay in one location.
A solution to this is sometimes flipping planes because they have already been prepped and loaded a different aircraft so they can have a quicker turnover than if the crew stayed on the same plane.
One time I was on a plane that got flipped and when we got to MDW and then the new gate they were ready to board the aircraft thus saving a potential 20 min delay. Us carry over poassangers were allowed to board first but they already had As in line to board.
#15
Join Date: Feb 2008
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These are all great explanations and make perfectly good sense from a passenger's perspective. What surprises me is the Captain's comments over the intercom stating "these things don't make sense to us either". It conveys a lack of confidence in WN's Ops Management from the flight crew.