Originally Posted by Badenoch

It was the right choice. The passengers in Goose Bay were perhaps in discomfort but no immediate danger. UA is hardly going to off-load a plane full of passengers so they can take their aircraft to rescue other passengers. "Excuse us ladies and gentlemen but your flight has been canceled because we need your plane to fly other people whose plane is out of service. Sorry your luck." Instead of one plane load of unhappy people now you have two.

What sort of "alternative solutions" do you think the good people of Goose Bay, all 8 thousand or so of them, should put in place for the occasional diversion of aircraft?

Originally Posted by transportprof

I wonder why UA didn't send two smaller aircraft (737s) for this YYR rescue? I would think it's easier to rejig flight schedules on multi-frequency per day shorter flights to free up two smaller aircraft to go to YYR, rather than face the choice of canceling a once daily (or perhaps twice daily) longhaul 777 flight, or just waiting until there is a gap in the 777 utilization. Heck, even one 737 could have made two trips YYR-EWR in the time it took to get the 777 in position.

Originally Posted by simpleflyer

And where do they have these standby crews and planes, at every major airport they service, only selected airports? (New York, Chicago, LA..) Would standby mean, ready to go on 3 hours notice, or literally sitting in the airport waiting to go (unlikely, crazy expensive.).

Originally Posted by LarryJ

For the pilots, you have field standby, short-call, and long-call reserves.

For a long-call assignment you BEGIN your 10hr rest AFTER you have been assigned the trip. You have 11:30 hours to report for a Global flight but that ensures that you are starting fresh with a full duty period available. That lead time won't work for a rescue flight so long-calls weren't available in this case.

Short-call has a report time of 2:30 then time to flight plan and preflight. The duty time limits are more complicated, though, since you're already on the hook for a phone call from the beginning of the short-call period which counts against your ultimate duty-day limit (though not 1:1). So, you may have pilots on short-call reserve who could report quickly but wouldn't have available duty time to make the round trip. You need to use short-calls who have only just started their short-call availability period. That's would be why pilots could time out while waiting for F/As.

Field standy is on-duty at the airport but also have the duty day limitations and they are staged to cover specific ultra long-haul flights where the a relatively short delay can cause the original crews to time out (such as EWR-HKG) so, by the time the need for the recovery was known the field standby's were either gone or didn't have enough duty time available for the round trip.

It wasn't just the pilots and F/As that were needed. They sent mechanics to fix the airplane, ramp workers to handle the passengers and ground ops, blankets, hot beverages, and food. That all had to be collected and loaded.

None of this starts happening until you know that you need a recovery flight. Initially, you think you'll fuel and go. Then you have a maintenance problem and call out the contract mechanics. If it's not business hours the contract mechanics may have to come from home which takes time. Then the mechanics evaluate the problem and attempt to fix in. In this case, the initial problem was not the door being frozen shut. That happened while they were working on the initial problem.

Immigration must approve passenger deplaning and will monitor to ensure that uncleared passengers don't enter the country. From news reports, that didn't occur until the next morning and, at that time, passengers were allowed to deplane in groups of about 20 passengers at a time.

Contract maintenance would be the first mechanics to look at the problem. If it is something that they can't handle then the airline will send company mechanics, tools, and parts.

Originally Posted by KRSW

I've been working for one of the Alaska air carriers since last summer and can assure you, cold weather is miserable to work in and engines are sometimes ornery to start in cold weather, BUT the aircraft still operate as expected. MX/AOG happens. BUT it can be prevented with proper preventative maintenance. This costs money. Even easier (and cheaper) is having a practical IRROPs plan and being willing to pull the trigger on it, knowing that it will cost more. It probably costs less to properly maintain your aircraft than dispatch rescue flights, but no one ever said bean counters were smart or practical.

The temperatures experienced at Goose Bay are the norm for much of Alaska, where air transport is often the ONLY form of transport in many areas, and even more villages in the winter when the land & sea routes are closed off. If we don't fly, mail, medicine, even supplies needed to treat the villages' water supplies aren't getting to their destination. I use Alaska Airlines as an example since they're flying Boeing jets, like UA is in this case. BUT I'd be remiss to not mention all of the smaller air carriers which fly a motley crew of aircraft in this weather, some much, much older and crusty. Everts Cargo is still flying multiple 60-65 year old DC-6s daily in such weather.

Originally Posted by Imstevek

Originally Posted by EWR764

Are you arguing that United's preventive maintenance practices are causally related to this issue? What more specific information do you have about this, or is this pure speculation? Do you know exactly what part failed, and why? How would "proper" preventive maintenance practices mitigate the issue? Moreover, what are your specific criticisms of the way UA handled the IRROPS event? What were the staffing challenges (especially coming off a winter storm event several days before) that UA should have handled better? Were there multiple 'rescue flight' options and legal crew to cover? Did UA make a cost decision? I am genuinely curious, and you seem to know.

I'd wager the 777 door operation and arming mechanism is a bit more finicky and complicated than the 737s (all manual, no power assist) as operated by Alaska in the conditions you describe. Certainly not an excuse, but direct exposure (e.g. no jetbridge) for long periods in -30F ambient temperatures is not exactly within the usual ground operations envelope for the 777.

Originally Posted by prestonh

Delta. They rescued flight 128 diverted to Shemya en-route from PEK to SEA on Christmas Eve. rescue flight was on the ground 11 hours later and that was 6.23 hrs flight from SEA. So it took them <7 hours to get that flight in the air from when they knew of the diversion.

Originally Posted by prestonh

Delta. They rescued flight 128 diverted to Shemya en-route from PEK to SEA on Christmas Eve. rescue flight was on the ground 11 hours later and that was 6.23 hrs flight from SEA. So it took them <7 hours to get that flight in the air from when they knew of the diversion.



from what i understood it was that the affected door (3R) had to be opened to inspect on indication and in the process some moisture accumulated and froze the door so they could not finish. since there was no towing or hangar and it was super cold they were stuck

Originally Posted by JimInOhio

The Delta diversion was for an entirely different reason. They knew long before the flight even touched down in the Aleutians that they'd need a rescue aircraft. The UA 777, I'm sure everyone expected, would land, discharge the ill passenger, and then take off for HKG. Why would UA think they'd need a rescue aircraft in this situation?

Originally Posted by JimInOhio

The Delta diversion was for an entirely different reason. They knew long before the flight even touched down in the Aleutians that they'd need a rescue aircraft. The UA 777, I'm sure everyone expected, would land, discharge the ill passenger, and then take off for HKG. Why would UA think they'd need a rescue aircraft in this situation?