My flight was delayed because the main computer on the plain broke. I am interested to know where do they keep spare airplanes and what steps do they need to go through before they can act as a replacement.
Thanks!
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It depends a lot on the situation, but the easiest thing to do is take one of the next planes coming into that location and give it to your flight crew. Then you all get on that one, and one of the later flights gets your original (fixed) plane.
Planes make money when they’re flying, so they don’t like to keep spare planes sitting around. They’d rather get you flying now with a different plane. Sometimes, it’s as easy as “Okay, plane 438 is broken, so you are flying on plane 456 instead. Go get on that one.” They should have your luggage moved, and your crew sets up the new plane with the needed fuel, etc. They’ll probably have a cleaning crew or maintenance crew come check if they need to check it before it goes out again.
Planes are giving the right amount of fuel for their flight, and the flight crew have to be set up. The pilots have to ensure the location is put into the computers and safety checks performed. But apart from them, a plane can have a very quick turnaround time.
It is like this because it is economically encouraged.
Every airport has a lot of hangers where it stores planes when they are not used. They might of taken one from there, or redirected another flight for your flight, and passed on the problem down the chain
Depends where you are. If you’re at the airline’s main hub, then they may well have a ‘hot spare’ aircraft for exactly this sort of reason. This is especially the case on less busy travel days.
They may also pull an aircraft from another flight that’s departing later in the day, allowing the engineers some time to fix the broken plane.
If you’re at an outstation, then things get trickier. Some outstations still have lots of flexibility – you might just get pushed onto the next flight of the day. Others, for example a long haul destination served only once a day, cause problems, and sometimes another aircraft has to be flown over empty to get the passengers home.
They don’t really keep spare airplanes. But for regulatory reasons, airplanes need to go to service at very regulated intervals. If an airplane is at an airport and cannot fly to another without exceeding its service interval, it will not fly.
For that reason, airline companies will have some wiggle room in their fleet. They kind of need to have some wiggle room, knowing that one plane or another will be stranded and waiting for service because the specific airport it is on has a smaller workshop that has longer waiting times.
Then, of course, the only way to uphold a decent service level when you own a lot of machinery, is to have enough spares to be able to temporarily decommission one if needed. If you own a thousand planes, you surely own 10-20 something that are “just” there for filling out the unavoidable blanks.
It’s also how you handle delays: if all the machines are always either in the air or waiting for passengers to onboard or board…there is absolutely no wiggle room what so ever for delays, and even an hours delay will cause HUNDREDS of flights in the upcoming weeks to be delayed. And that just ain’t a good idea, which means that you have to have a reasonable amount of extras (probably just coming out of the service workshop) at hubs with a lot of traffic, so that you can end the chain of delays by bringing out another airplane instead of wait for the one that is not landing as planned.
And then it’s the matter of having better and worse days, planning wise. People who commute by plane do it Sunday evening or Monday morning and Friday evening or Saturday morning. Or maybe Thursday really late. And you probably need to have the most number of planes in the air at the same time during those peak travel windows. But less so on, say, a Wednesday. Or midday Friday.
Also, a lot of airlines lease their planes. And it’s the same for them as it is for you when you lease a car; if it breaks down you call a phone number and demand that they arrange something so that you can get to work as normal. Sometimes you get a higher standard in the loaner and sometimes you get a lower standard in the loaner, but you WILL get a loaner. In fact, a company specialises in leasing airplanes who has thousands, literally, of machines on the same continent will ALSO have extras standing ready in case they are needed. It’s bad for business to not have anything available anywhere.
You said “a few hours”, too. It means that whatever airplane they shook up COULD have been scheduled all along to be incoming at your airport, and just happened to do that 15-20 minutes before you boarded. Instead of idling for three hours, it went outbound immediately again, and they gamble on that in those three hours they would have had a new computer flown in or had something else arranged.
Traffic planning is always a mess, I don’t envy people who do that shit for a living.
EDIT: read my first paragraph again. I said that they don’t really keep spares. And that is because even if you purchase and plan for the need of spares, do they actually count as spares if you can statistically prove that you are going to need them all the time? Aren’t the spares then suddenly just a regular necessity?
Thank of it being at a rental car center. They have cars, and in this case the captain is person renting the car. Car comes back, get cleaned and refueled. If a car breaks and not available, then a recently returned car is quickly prepped or another car for other renter gets substituted.
Basically at an airplane hub, they have other airplanes and parts in the hangers.
Airlines with a lot of aircraft can swap planes at times. Other times, they just need to send the part (and sometimes a mechanic) to the AOG (aircraft on ground) plane. There are specialty logistics companies that handle this work, and have a few options to get the parts to the AOG plane. Fly it on another airline, drive it , or charter a plane. Depending on the cost of the AOG plane, the airline will determine what they’ll do to get plane off ground ASAP. They also have an option to borrow a part from another airline. This is called Loan and Borrow and that has a cost and logistics to return associated with it.
Southwest’s advantage is they only have one type of plane so swapping out and making sure you have the correct pilot and staff for the equipment and having the correct parts is much easier for them.
Among all the other obvious reasons, this is also a main reason why I refuse to fly budget airlines. They either don’t have enough aircraft to swap or not going to pay the cost to get the AOG part there ASAP.
Frankfurt is a large European hub. We sat on the side of the taxiway for 2 1/2 hours while a technician repaired a fuel leak on the aircraft and a fuel truck came out to refill the fuel tanks. They don’t always put you on a different aircraft…
Let’s say the airline have 5 planes flying into that airport this afternoon. Your on the 1st plane, and it breaks down. They give the 2nd plane to your flight, the 3rd plane to the flight that should have been on the 2nd plane, and so on. And the people who should have been on the 5th plane get your original plane once it’s fixed. So everyone faces a small delay rather than one flight facing a massive one
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