VS23 & VS24 usually arrive and depart at LHR within 30mins of each, would there be an advantage to the airline to advance the LAX departure and delay the LHR departure by 1hr and use the same aircraft,thus freeing up one plane.
Or is that too simple, what am I missing?

Quoting readytotaxi (Thread starter): VS23 & VS24 usually arrive and depart at LHR within 30mins of each, would there be an advantage to the airline to advance the LAX departure and delay the LHR departure by 1hr and use the same aircraft,thus freeing up one plane. Or is that too simple, what am I missing?

Where are those aircraft before and after they run those two legs? They may be participating in more time-critical turns somewhere else within their individual routings. In other words, it may not be the LHR overlap that's driving their utilization, it may be somewhere else and you're just seeing the result at LHR.

Tom.

Readytotaxi,

If you go onto V-Flyer, you can get a breakdown of the rotations each of the VS fleet do. Makes for interesting reading!

Quoting tdscanuck (Reply 1): Where are those aircraft before and after they run those two legs? They may be participating in more time-critical turns somewhere else within their individual routings

Good thinking.

Quoting flyingcello (Reply 2): Makes for interesting reading!

New to me, very interesting, thanks

LHR-LAX-LHR can't be run with one aircraft round-trip--the block times are too long. The aircraft must rotate in from somewhere else. With a shorter route, this would be fine, but LHR-LAX is ~11 hours each way--you'd have to hit your block times exactly and manage a one-hour turn on each side. Simply not realistic.

Quoting readytotaxi (Thread starter): VS23 & VS24 usually arrive and depart at LHR within 30mins of each, would there be an advantage to the airline to advance the LAX departure and delay the LHR departure by 1hr and use the same aircraft,thus freeing up one plane. Or is that too simple, what am I missing?

Airlines try to avoid what are referred to as closed routings. That’s where the same airplane goes back and forth between a select few destinations repeatedly. Airlines typically build a rotation where an airplane flies through the entire network and then repeat between A checks. The primary reason to avoid closed routings is to help maintenance. If all the 747s in VS’ fleet are doing the same rotation, then they can have consistent A checks with the same number of hours on the airplanes. Swaps happen and can lead to some scheduling challenges, but to minimize maintenance costs and maintain fleet reliability, airplanes should fly throughout the system on all routes that operate that subfleet.

An example would be:

A check
LHR-LAX
LAX-LHR
LHR-EWR
EWR-LHR
LHR-HAV
HAV-LHR
8 hour ground time for interim maintenance
LHR-SFO
SFO-LHR
LHR-MCO
MCO-LHR
Repeat…
A Check
Resume…

The schedule is usually timed to make this work. Every airline is different and I’m not sure how VS does it.

Quoting simairlinenet (Reply 4):

Quoting Roseflyer (Reply 5):

Very good points, thank you.

As others have mentioned, it wouldnt work anyway as the block times arent realistic. There is usually at least 21 hours flying time required to operate LHR-LAX-LHR. You would also need to factor in up to an hour of taxi time. That only leaves 60 minutes for each turn. You really need double that, and as soon as there is a minor issue you would have to swap the aircraft anyway, causing a delay and additional cost and disruption.

But even if it would work, there is simply no need. As mentioned above aircraft are (generally, there are restrictions) rotated through a variety of routes to keep MX schedules and aircraft wear and tear relatively constant. Longer sectors will be combined with shorter ones to even out the utilisation. Here are a couple of actual examples;

LHR---------JFK-----------LHR------------LAX------------LHR------------DXB--- -----LHR
1650---2000-2215---1030-1515---1855-2115---1555-2110---0800-1005---1415

Or

LHR---------MIA-----------LHR------------EWR------- ---LHR------- ----SFO-----------LHR------------JFK---------LHR
1245---1740-1950---0935-1600---1905-2115---0905-1100---1415-1625---1045-1300---1605-1920---0740

Hope that helps

Quoting sevenheavy (Reply 7):

Very well explained.