machnumber From Greenland, joined Jul 2011, 45 posts, RR: 0 Posted (1 year 6 months 2 weeks 5 days 14 hours ago) and read 1980 times:
I've been wondering about this for a while. If you look at the equipment Turkish Airlines uses on some long haul flights you can see that they are both using Airbus and Boeing aircraft on the same flight.
As an example: on TK11 IST-JFK they are using anything from A330/340 to B777. It is not uncommon to see 5 days of Airbus service followed by a day of 777 and then Airbus again etc. It seems like they use whatever they have. There is no pattern and it is very random.
You can see the same approach on different flights like occasional B777's in ORD.
The same is true for Far eastern flights.
I'm wondering how they arrange the flight crews for such flights.
I couldn't think of many other examples for major airlines (except maybe airlines in the US) that use the same system, that's why I thought it was interesting.
Fabo From Slovakia, joined Aug 2005, 1111 posts, RR: 1 Reply 3, posted (1 year 6 months 2 weeks 1 day 13 hours ago) and read 1765 times:
Either that can do that, or they can go gome on an Airbus flight, or they could be dlowen to, say, Chicago and operate next flight from there. I think any of that is possible. My best guess is, what is the cheapest option, will be used, and I guess that would be the fly them home on own flight option most times.
The light at the end of tunnel turn out to be a lighted sing saying NO EXIT
machnumber From Greenland, joined Jul 2011, 45 posts, RR: 0 Reply 4, posted (1 year 6 months 2 weeks 1 day 12 hours ago) and read 1756 times:
I still think it's rather strange that they use random equipment. I can see a fluctuation between A330 and A340 but occasional 777 must cause a lot of trouble in terms of crew planning? Wouldn't it be just cheaper to stick to one equipment?
Fabo From Slovakia, joined Aug 2005, 1111 posts, RR: 1 Reply 5, posted (1 year 6 months 2 weeks 1 day 9 hours ago) and read 1741 times:
Well, in todays world of automation, it might as well be just a matter of clicks to distribute schedules. And having more options to choose from might even help to utilise flight time limits better...
My best guess is, that there is a "pool" of aircraft available for every route, and then some software picks types or even specific aircraft in order to maximise profits, considering existing and/or expected sales for that particular flight.
Then this data is fed into the crew planning software, which would know what is who typed on (while between pilots it might be relatively straightforward, with CC it can be a whole lot worse with crosstraining, I suppose), knows duty limits, etc. and it would then spit out optimal crew rotations.
I do believe that this is relatively easily possible to program. (given time and funds of course, e.g. I can not spit such a program out in a week, but I can not see any big technical limitation why not)
The light at the end of tunnel turn out to be a lighted sing saying NO EXIT
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