AllanJ

Every time we go to the airport and find our flight cancelled due to "a mechanical" we ask, why not roll out another airplane?

So I thought I might ask (out of curiosity, this is not a poll), how many spare airplanes do airlines have on hand.

Of course, airplanes don't make money standing still, so airlines don't want to have too many spares.

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(One of Boston's subway lines runs 162 cars at peak rush hour but has 56 spares. More typical is 18 spares for a 149 car need on another line and they regard that as a car shortage. Did a quick survey of new Song Airlines and came up with a need of 29 planes for their projected schedule in November.)


[This message has been edited by AllanJ (edited 05-08-2003).]

[This message has been edited by AllanJ (edited 05-08-2003).]

businesstraveler

Your assuming there really was a mechanical issue, as opposed to the flight not having enough passengers to make it worth it. Of course, an airline would never cancel a flight for that reason....

As far as spare aircraft, while the airlines do have a certain number of back-up aircraft available at any given time, it is difficult to predict where it will be needed. While the odds are better at a major hub, what if a back-up is needed and a secondary location? They would have to ferry the aircraft, which take time and is expensive. It might be better financially to put passengers on other flights or even other airlines.

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[This message has been edited by businesstraveler (edited 05-08-2003).]

dbaker

The cost of idling a "spare" aircraft at a hub is enormous, plus that would only cover flights departing that hub, not the ones heading there or to other hubs.

If it wasn't the same configuration as the plane that couldn't fly, it would be a logistical issue of reassigning seats and potentially bumping passengers between classes and off the plane.

If it wasn't the same type aircraft, the flight crew might not be certified to fly it and even if they were, they might not be current to fly it with passengers.

Airlines would be much better off cancelling flights and putting folks on another airline or a later flight. The industry is limping along as it is without this incredible expense.

studentff

I've sometimes heard from various sources of various quality that there are a small number of spare aircraft at major hubs.

Anecdotally, I was on UA314 ORD-IND on March 26 when the captain found an oil leak on the starbord engine on his pre-departure walkaround. We were deplaned and assigned a spare aircraft at a different gate that we boarded about 1.5 hours later. Same equipment type (A320 if I remember right),same crew, same seat assignments, and same boarding pass stubs for all passengers.

The delay was mildly annoying, but overall I was pleased at how well UA handled it. There were many stupider things they could have done such as cancelling 314 and trying to cram us on the two later flights to IND (they were mostly full already).



[This message has been edited by studentff (edited 05-09-2003).]

Steve M

This is true. I don't think any airline could afford to keep extra aircraft in its airworthy inventory just sitting around for the sole purpose of serving as a "hot spare" in case it was needed due to a maintenance cancellation.

Having said that, often times there will be an extra aircraft at the airport, especially if it's a hub or maintenance base for that carrier. When provisioning their fleet, for each type of equipment, each carrier has to take into consideration what will be the maximum number of aircraft that will be out of service for routine maintenance, plus a reasonable estimate of the high end of the number out of service due to non-scheduled maintenance issues.

Whenever circumstances are such that they are not at their maximum out-of-service ratio, there will be extra airworthy aircraft, even if they weren't purchased for that purpose explicitly. In these cases, it makes perfect sense to put them into service when need be, both for the passengers' convenience and to save reaccomodation costs.

Although I'm sure that the above has happened, I don't think it's nearly as widespread as some people believe. Far more often, a sleight-of-hand is used that can easily be misinterpreted as the above. Consider the situation of a major hub-and-spoke carrier that has 40 flights departing during a particular hour from one of its hubs. One of their 737's develops problems and must be taken out of service, but was scheduled to serve an overbooked flight.

What often happens in this situation is that there will be an aircraft substitution whereby the broken aircraft is swapped out with a working one, where the broken one is put on the flight that has the fewest passengers, and the overbooked flight gets the working one.

Over time, this can lead to the impression that low-load flights are falsely cancelled due to maintenance, when the actual situation was that an aircraft on a high-yield route was swapped.

If the only benefit of this policy was to reduce costs for the carrier, I'd be complaining about it too. But, in the long run, it actually works out better for the "average" passenger as well, as there are fewer cancellations overall due to maintenance. Most of us have probably flown on a full on-time flight not having realized that the originally-scheduled aircraft was taken out of service due to maintenance.

Of course, there will be a few people that regularly travel on a low-yield flight and end up taking more than their fair share of cancellations. The above plan doesn't work out very well for them and can easily lead to the impression that cancellations are falsified by the airline as being due to maintenance in order to not fly low-yield flights.

0524

AA rolled out a spare 757 at LAX for us last weekend when a mechanical issue grounded our first aircraft.