Why are budget airlines constantly delayed and canceling flights, when main airlines usually takeoff as scheduled?
In: Other
Delays can happen due to a variety of reasons.
1. Lack of manpower
2. Poorly serviced/older planes that need to be tuned up more frequently
3. Snowballing delays (one delay begets another)
4. This is inside info, but Air Traffic Controllers will usually prioritize the more expensive airline. Of course, this may vary based on country and whatnot.
Budget airlines intend to have their flights turn around and take off again ASAP.
This is all well and good until one delay happens. Now suddenly passengers miss connections and need to be rerouted, planes and pilots are out of position, there’s a plane sitting at a gate that another was planning to offload at, and everything is chaos.
The tighter your schedule, the bigger the cascade effect is. And budget airlines run very tight schedules.
Budget airlines do not have “hubs” like big airlines to. A typical day for a budget airline might start at A, fly to B, fly to C, fly to D, and end at E. If something happens to the A-B flight, everything else down the line gets messed up.
Meanwhile a big airline will fly from A to B, then back to A, and back to B. If something happens with an aircraft, they will have others on the same route ready to absorb the other passengers
In addition to what the others said about tight schedule: sometimes you don’t get a trip from A to B, you get a number of separate flights from one airport to the other, where it might happen that in order to reach B you booked multiple flights. These flights are not connected.
A big carrier brings you from A to B, no matter the route. If something doesn’t work on one flight, they might get you on another flight.
If the low cost carrier is delayed or cancels a flight, and you don’t get your connection, that’s suddenly (or not so suddenly) your problem. You just get your money back, and have to deal with full planes and unavailable tickets.
That’s how Ryanair operates here, and that’s how our booking system forbids Ryanair flights by default. No one wants the hassle of dealing with a stranded passenger somewhere.
Some good answers. One of the bigger factors though is that “legacy” airlines usually keep spare aircraft at their base. If a plane goes out of service, they can often replace it with one on standby. Budget airlines, to keep their operating costs down, don’t have as many or maybe any spares, so they typically will have to delay or cancel the flight.
Read up on the cause of the Southwest Christmas meltdown of 2022. It boils down to a “point to point” model vs a “hub to spoke” model.
Bompared to budget airlines, larger “main” (as OP calls them) airlines have more spare equipment, and spare personnel, to substitute when airplanes need repair or crews time out – even if their margin is the same percentage, averagine over a larger fleet and crew reduces delays and cancellations.
I flew my family to Cairns (from Brisbane) on Tiger Airways for a long weekend holiday. On the Monday morning we were due to fly I received a text message that said your 2pm flight has been delayed and will now take off at 5pm. We take advantage of the delay and have a slow lunch and another swim. We arrive at the airport just before 4pm. Lining up in the check-in queue we can hear a guy loudly arguing with the Tiger staff about missing his flight and can hear the staff reply to him by saying that if he had read to the end of the text message that the flight was delayed but check-in was not and he should have been at the airport by 1pm to get on the flight. I whip out my phone and read to the end of the text message to read the same information. I had to pay an extra thousand dollars to get my family on a Qantas flight that evening. Staff at the Qantas desk said that Tiger frequently overbooked their flights and used tactics like this to allow passengers to self select themselves out of the flight. Thanks Tiger!
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