121 Question: On Mx Delays...

killbilly

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This topic likely touches a number of departments - mx, dispatch, scheduling and pilots themselves.

I'm just looking for some answers.

Question: When a flight is going to be delayed (more than 1 hour) because of a maintenance issue:

1) What criteria are used to determine whether or not a replacement aircraft and crew are dispatched?
2) Same as #1 but for cancelling the flight?

I had SWA (and I know, I'm the biggest fan/apologist of SWA there is) completely jack me on a flight to DAL from DCA last week due to this. But no one could answer the above for me.
 
1. It depends.
2. It depends.

What's it depend on? Whether there are extra planes and/or crews available, and whether the flight in question is very important. BWI-EWR with one person booked on the flight? The flight is getting cancelled, and the plane may end up getting ferried to a MX base somewhere.

DFW to London? Well, I doubt they have a ton of extra 777's lying around.

Is the crew going to time out? If so, is there another crew?

There are tons of things that can affect this, but unfortunately it's out of the pilots hands, and somebody else makes these choices.
 
1. It depends.
2. It depends.

What's it depend on? Whether there are extra planes and/or crews available, and whether the flight in question is very important. BWI-EWR with one person booked on the flight? The flight is getting cancelled, and the plane may end up getting ferried to a MX base somewhere.

DFW to London? Well, I doubt they have a ton of extra 777's lying around.

Is the crew going to time out? If so, is there another crew?

There are tons of things that can affect this, but unfortunately it's out of the pilots hands, and somebody else makes these choices.

Right!

So. What are the criteria? Revenue? Pax issues? I want to know how the decision is made.
 
I do too.

It honestly depends on the day. I've seen all sorts of things I could have never possibly predicted happen.
 
In my experience they wait as long as they can hoping beyond hope that the problem will magically fix itself somehow and then end up cancelling the flight and then let mainline customer service handle the irate passengers, but then again I flew for Mesa.
 
Right!

So. What are the criteria? Revenue? Pax issues? I want to know how the decision is made.
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The answer is everything.... literally. There are so many different things that go into that decision. What happens is you always hope for the best because if you dont and cancel the flight then it ends up you couldve gone then you just jacked everything up.

With a MX issue so many factors affect the amount of time it takes to fix the problem its impossible to come up with an accurate time.... so your simply left waiting till some sort of limit is reached (crew rest, etc etc....). Now if they know that that plane isnt going anywhere anytime soon and your in an outstation chances are the flight gets canceled fairly quickly, but most of the time they are always looking at ways to save the flight so there is usually some sort of hope that it still goes.

You also have to factor in that in times of irregular ops people are being overworked and working on 10 different problems at the same time. This is usually the problem explaining things to passengers as to them all they see is one flight when any 121 operation is far far more.

If you want more potential insight then youd have to tell us more about your particular situation.
 
From my experience in the SOC, it depends. When there's mx, first we want to avoid a cnx. First question is how long will it take to have it fixed? If it's something major then the flight is axed right away! If not, then it gets tricky. MX control usually never have a definitive answer but based on their answer, everything is evaluated. How late can we run the flight? How long will the crew last? How many passengers on board? Can they get re-routed.? Do we have a spare plane and ready/reserve crew to do the flight? How long will it take to get the crew and plane there or ready to go? Can another crew be swapped to fly the leg? Should we cnx another flight so that we have a plane and crew to do it? The best course of action is taken based on what MX, Dispatch and scheduling are able to do. Obviously if dispatch cannot find a spare, scheduling has no crews and MX cannot fix it soon, the delay will continue till we find a solution or cnx the flight if we don't. Sometimes the best solution is to just cnx the flight but we have to run out of ideas and resources to get to that point. We had situations were MX finally fixes the plane after the flight is delayed all day but both crews that were swapped to make it work time out by a few minutes.
 
Right!

So. What are the criteria? Revenue? Pax issues? I want to know how the decision is made.

I don't think you will ever get a satisfactory answer to your question, regardless of who you ask (to include dispatch or SOC of any given airline)

I don't think there is a set standard criteria in place, I think it is all dynamic and varies with the given situation and probably over a dozen variables. A few people have already listed a few, and I'm sure there are even more that we don't think of.

Can you fix it
Can you MEL it
Do we have another plane
Do we have another crew
How will the crew being somewhere else affect the following day
How will the plane being somewhere else affect the following day
How many pax on the flight
How many pax on the next flight to the same destination.
What is the destination (Big Deal for us!)
Last flight of the day/night.
Will the crew time out

etc and so on.

I don't think there is a black and white answer.
 
I guess I'm asking in terms of cost-benefit analysis.

Example:

Last week I'm on SWA from DCA to DAL, with a connection in AUS. Flight is set to depart at 17:15 but the inbound aircraft for us was delayed earlier in the day due to MX meaning we were scheduled for something like 19:15 out. So they tell me they can get me to AUS but not DAL that night. I have options at this point:

1) Leave DCA and head to IAD or BWI and attempt to re-book to get in to DAL. Not really possible, logistically or temporally.
2) Take same flight next day - there are no earlier departures out of DCA so I burn a day of vacation.
3) Go to AUS, spend the night there, book out the following morning early to get to DAL.

So I opted for 3. But the whole I was wondering what it would have taken for them to get another crew and a plane from a base like BWI, or at the very least, run one more AUS-DAL flight that night to get the 70 or so of us there that night. Although they gave me a voucher for a future SWA flight, I was out of pocket on a hotel which was irritating, but my choice.
 
There isn't really a rubric for these kinds of situtations. Decisions are made on a case-by-case basis, and there are a lot of variables. Rather than discuss the variables, I'll talk about the biases. The first bias is than an airline wants to run the flight. That's where the money comes from. The second bias is that they want to run it on time due to statistical goals and contractual incentives/penalties. The third bias is that some city pairs are "more equal" than others, and so flights to those cities may be treated differently than others. And finally, for all intents and purposes, there are no such things is "spares" in the airline business. Sometimes you get lucky and have a crew and plane available, but for the most part, you're robbing peter to pay paul. If they do come up with a "spare," more than likely it is because some other flight was sacrificed in favor of yours.
 
This topic likely touches a number of departments - mx, dispatch, scheduling and pilots themselves.

I'm just looking for some answers.

Question: When a flight is going to be delayed (more than 1 hour) because of a maintenance issue:

1) What criteria are used to determine whether or not a replacement aircraft and crew are dispatched?
2) Same as #1 but for cancelling the flight?

I had SWA (and I know, I'm the biggest fan/apologist of SWA there is) completely jack me on a flight to DAL from DCA last week due to this. But no one could answer the above for me.
They pull out the magic 8-ball and get their answer.
 
Sometimes you get lucky and have a crew and plane available, but for the most part, you're robbing peter to pay paul. If they do come up with a "spare," more than likely it is because some other flight was sacrificed in favor of yours.

Personally I would rather rob Peter, kill Paul, and screw Mary.

But that's just me.
 
Thanks for the replies, all. Seems like a make-the-decision-on-the-fly type thing.

I'm guessing the cost basis won out - it was cheaper to issue us $200 vouchers than it was to run another flight from AUS to DAL.

(shrug)
 
Once an FO called in sick in LGA and they didn't make it to Augusta, GA that night. The company elected to burn a ready reserve crew (CA & FO) AND a plane to ferry it down in the morning instead of canceling it. The reason? The Masters had just finished and it was a high profile flight for XYZ company.

Often times when things get dragged out it's because the company thinks they can fix the issue with contract mx. Or they have to get a mx crew on a road trip to come fix the plane.

As to things "only breaking at mx bases" that may be how things used to run but it certainly isn't that way any more. I was pushing back out of SYR one day and the starter sheared around 18% N2. We couldn't start the right engine if we wanted to. Back to the gate and we went to the hotel.

There are some nuisance things that happen but mx now has a plan called an "FIM" procedure (I believe it stands for fault something something) that allows pilots to pull circuit breakers to reset the computers. Even something like a "stall fail" or "flaps fail" can now be reset on the CRJ where as before it would've required contract mx to come out (30-45 mins response time) plus a ton of other paperwork (at least 30 mins worth) to get her going again.
 
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