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!
In: 33
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?
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