red eye flights
 

Say a plane leaves LAX at 1130pm and arrives at O'Hare at 530 am. Does sthat plane usually go out of service for the day or used for the day flights? I know most of the day and evening flight planes either park at the gate overnight or get towed to remote.

They normally turn them around for flights during the day - the redeyes are a good way to increase aircraft utilization.

Airlines never want their planes sitting on the ground for any length in time.

I think a red eye flight is not different from any other flight with regard to aircraft utilization. They will turn it around as soon as possible.

im sure the longer the flight the longer the turnaround.

An overnight flight from LAX to ORD will certainly inflict a red eye on the traveler. :rolleyes:

SFO-ORD is even worse IMHO. at least UA used to put an intl 767 on that route for the redeye so you could upgrade to C and get a couple of hours of rest. i'm not sure if they still do though.

I don't think so. Turnaround depends on plane size and schedule, not on the duration of the flight.

I'd guess that a plane is more likely to get some "rest" prior to its red-eye flight, not after. That is, an aircraft arrives in a West Coast city around 8 or 9 local time, then gets a two-hour or so break until the red-eye departs.

This cushion allows for some padding to get back on schedule in the event of earlier delays, thus preventing one day's poor ops from spilling into the next day. Certainly this isn't true in all cases, but I think it's far more likely that an arriving red-eye aircraft is immediately turned around to be a part of the first morning bank of flights.

Although longer flights may need a more rigorous clean than say a SFO-LAX hop where passengers get off and find the gate area full with the next group waiting to board.

Or SFO-DFW...on an MD-80 :eek:

All the redeyes I've done this year (a couple too many) have had full gates of people waiting to board the aircraft as I was deplaning.

I actively avoid the midcon redeyes, including once booking an extra connection so I could redeye LAX-MCO rather than LAX-ORD. The worst is ANC-SEA with a strong tailwind...under 3 hours. I did that once this year, but with $600 in UA travel credits in my pocket. ;)

I'm doing LAS-MSP redeye next week. Really not looking forward to that - leaves at 12:50 a.m. Pacific, arrives in Minneapolis at 5:45 a.m. Central - block time of 2h55 minutes, flight time of about 2h30.

That'll be a real fun Monday...

Try JFK-ICN, leaves at 12:30AM eastern, gets into ICN at 3:45AM :eek:. Flight time 14.5 hours. Oh yeah, and the airport buses don't come until 5:40 so you're stuck there until then. I think the plane sits there until it flies off somwhere sometime between 9 and 10. But the last time I flew redeye within the states the plane showed up, offloaded pax, cleaned, loaded pax, and then flew back out. I think the turn was 90 minutes or so, which seems really long for an A320.

Not for work but I'll be doing a similar trip SEA-MSP in a few weeks. Just hope I can stay up through a live performance of APHC. If anyone hears snoring on the radio... :D

Actually, my evening westbound flights to SEA (usually DL or NW, sometimes UA) typically arrive at 1000p or 1100p, and when we deplane there are gate lice standing right there waiting to depart for ATL / CVG / MSP, etc., so there's no "rest" before the redeye at all.