How many spare planes do airlines have?

Factual Questions
21

Actually SWA not hubbing is not real true any more, if it ever was. They have many major stations where lots of airplanes arrive and depart having swapped passengers. That’s functionally a hub even if they don’t call it that for marketing reasons. Off top of my head their quasi-hubs now are DAL, MDW, STL, ATL, BWI, PHX, & LAS. I may have missed one.

What they do do, much more than the other mainstream carriers, is route aircraft like Hub 1- ABC - DEF - GHI then to Hub 2. So they can carry pax ABC - DEF, ABC - GHI, and DEF - GHI without ever touching a hub. Nowadays with more hubs the most common pattern is Hub1 - ABC - DEF - Hub 2. So the direct outstation to outstation flights are an ever-shrinking percentage of the whole.

This is a different approach to providing regional service, which the other carriers supply with their regional affiliates. It’s also mostly a legacy of the Wright amendment which required them to leave Dallas Love (DAL) (their original HQ/hub)and land in one of the adjacent states before continuing farther away. So they went DAL - OKC - Denver instead of DAL - OKC - DAL & separately DAL - DEN - DAL.
As to full flights and disruptions, the whole industry is that way. If we’re running 90% load factors and one flight cancels, it’ll take 10 flights= ~2 to 10 days to squeeze all the displaced pax onto the remaining seats to their destination.

The truth is that a lot of travel just gets cancelled outright. If you can’t get to Grandma’s on the days you have vacation you don’t go at all. If you don’t make the business meeting on Tuesday, showing up on Thursday won’t work for the people you’re meeting. So the meeting is rescheduled for two weeks hence.

To be sure everybody that’s away from home needs to get back. But if the customers delete or defer 2/3rd of the outbound travel that solves 1/3rd of our overall problem. Hertz / Avis also do quite a business. As an employee trying to travel non-rev I’ve had to drive 1500 miles to get back home from a trip when I got caught out when a disruption hit. I was far from the only person in line at the rental car place that day looking to one-way a car back home.

22

With the exception of a few stations in overseas locations inhospitable to Americans that’s not done now and wasn’t much done even in the old days AFAIK.

When you’re out on the road working a trip it’s 100% hotels at any carrier I’ve ever worked for or known anything about.

IIRC Northwest Orient (as it was then named) used to have a stewardess dorm in Tokyo where the girls lived for months between opportunities to return to the US. But this was for use when they were back at base between trips. Not while working on trips. And was mostly about being cheaper for the airline to provide a dorm than to provide a cost-of-living allowance to reside in Tokyo.
What is done, both then and now is the so-called “crash pad”. Lots of airline crewmembers do not live in the city they work out of. I work & live in greater Miami. The last guy I flew with lives in Sacramento. The previous guy lives near Tampa and the guy before him lives outside Philadelphia. When I got transferred here I was willing to move here. They weren’t; they stayed wherever they & their family happened to be established.

What happens is some entrepreneurial pilot or FA buys a crap house or condo near the airport, or rents a 3 bedroom apartment. Then fills it with bunk beds. And re-rents space in it to as many as 4 people per bunk bed for maybe $100 or $150/mo apiece. The assumption being most people won’t be there most nights, and folks are sleeping all hours of the day as well. There’s no sheets or blankets; each person keeps their personal pillow & sleeping bag rolled up in the closet & selects their favorite vacant matress upon arrival. There’ll be some crappy kitchen utensils & equipment, a TV with basic cable, and in days gone by, an obsolete computer with a modem to connect to the company’s computers to check schedules, etc. Nowadays the usual is to provide Wi-Fi.

So the typical use pattern is you’ve got to go to fly starting, say, early Tuesday. You fly from home to the base on Monday afternoon, cab or bus to the crash pad, sleep in your bag Monday night, then get up & go early Tuesday. You get done Friday afternoon & hope to catch a flight from there straight home. If so, great. If not, you go back to the crash pad, sleep to Sat AM, then back to the airport to try to hitch a ride home. Meantime after you left Tue AM, somebody else arrived from an all-nighter & is going back out that same night on their next trip. So they sleep all day in their bag on the same bunk you just vacated.

With shit hotels near airports costing $75/night with the crew discount, a crash pad that costs the equivalent of 3 nights’ hotel room is a money-saver for commuting crews.

There are more civilized arrangements available for more money with a dedicated bed per person. And even more civilized arrangements with a dedicated bedroom per person.
Back in the old days when the jobs paid well, the fancier options were more popular. Some of the folks who’ve had great careers, invested well, or had side businesses live very well near the airport. I know 2 guys who co-own a million+ dollar 2-bedroom condo on the water in Coconut Grove. They each sleep there about 4x/month. For both of them their airline job is a sidelight to their real income and the condo is as much an investment as a sleeping arrangement.

23

Sorry, but I’m not following you.
Which is it: “100% hotels” or the crash pad?
Who decides, and who pays?
A crash pad costs $100 a month, but a hotel (plus meals, I assume) costs the airline $100 per day?

24

I’m guessing it’s hotels paid for by the airline when staying over during a flight

But it’s a crash pad at the home base where employees are responsible for their own housing. Some employees choose not to move their true homes when assigned to a new location and find it cheaper to have a crash pad than to pay for hotel rooms out of their own pocket for the few nights they are actually at “home base”.

From your Chicago-based message board, I wish you pleasant travels.

25

Houston Hobby, I think. (HOU) It definitely used to fill that role prior to the repeal of that dumb-assed protectionist Wright Amendment bullshit.

I’m pretty sure they have at least one plane dedicated to flying HOU-DAL most days. They have a flight every 50 minutes to an hour from something like 6 am through 6 pm Monday-Friday. I’d think it would be more trouble than it would be worth to try and schedule too many continuing flights to keep that schedule up. That’s not to say that they don’t have flights to/from elsewhere coming in and out; I’ve caught the final leg of flights that were like Nashville - Houston with stops in Little Rock and Dallas.

26

Ref chappachula: Telemark nailed it.

Crash pads and apartments are what commuters use when sleeping at the base while not working & unable to be at home. That’s in lieu of buying themselves a hotel room local to the base.

While out on a trip you stay in a hotel room chosen, reserved, and paid for by the airline. Ditto transportation to/from airport & hotel.

27

Ref bump … Can’t believe I forgot HOU. :smack:

Wright made sense when enacted. But DFW became successful faster than expected & Wright had served its legit purpose after about 7 years. The next 20ish were just another example of corporate warfare carried out via Congress.

28

I don’t know how many they have, but I rode the spare Virgin Airlines plane from London back to New York. Overhead compartment doors kept popping open, there was a section of seats without backs with yellow caution tape blocking them off. The whole thing was rattling all the way. Huge sigh of relief from everyone when we finally landed. I’m sure it was mechanically sound and there were nothing but cosmetic problems, but it still made me nervous.

29

Also …

SWA is engaged in a full court press to prevent any other airline from using DAL. They’re no white knight; they’re would-be monopolists like every other corp.

30

Oh, they’re just as bad as AA / City of Ft. Worth were on the Wright Amendment. They’re throwing a fit about other airlines using Love Field, and they’re using every bit of their remaining muscle to try and kill/hurt the private high speed rail project to link Dallas and Houston.

They’ll whine about being the underdogs under the Wright Amendment, and then once they get that repealed, they turn around and act just like their oppressors to another industry/other airlines.

I actually lost a lot of respect for them as a company because of that; I guess I drank their kool-aid about competition, etc… and then see them being/trying to be anti-competitive as hell.

31

Pax also rhymes with packs (v) as in: to fill completely, a : to crowd together, to cause or command to go without ceremony. :wink:

32

I wouldn’t go that far. But it is a collective noun that de-individualizes the customers. Like the word “gravel” has different connotations than does “gemstone” but they’re both just a word for rocks.

33

Oh you poor humor and grammatically challenged soul. You have my compassion.

34

So the very first reply to a serious OP was a joke?

35

I know of one small, discount airline that does only AB - BA flights. The crew loves it because they get to sleep at home every night. The airline saves on hotel rooms.

36

Correct. There’s also truth in jest.

37

I was talking to a Boeing engineer once and he told me that planes are designed for a useful life that accounts for both hours flown and number of takeoffs and landings. You want everything to wear out at once. So a long-haul plane might be designed for 100,000 hours and 10,000 cycles. When Japan Air Lines decided they needed 747s for their Tokyo-Osaka run, the math was all wrong. Boeing built a short range version of the plane with beefier landing gear, and probably quite a few other mods.

I would assume that airlines factor that into how they allocate planes to particular routes. If they just put one plane on the DAL-HOU run for its whole career you’d rack up a lifetime of cycles while some other parts would have a lot of hours left in them.

38

Most airlines have some fraction of crew trips like that. Maybe 10-20% of all work depending on the route structure at a particular base.

If you live in the base city and also live close to the airport they can be a popular choice. If you live a 3-hour drive from the airport or in another state, those 1-day trips lead to lots of driving, or a need for a self-pay hotel or crash pad near the airport.

Most crew bases for most carriers are at large airports in large cities. Which airports are often in older, less desirable areas to live and which are prone to heavy traffic on the roads & freeways. The normal workday for a 1-day trip is 10 to 12 hours scheduled on duty. That’s basically from the time you get to the gate to start work until you get off the airplane at the end. All the time from home to parking lot to gate and back is above that.

Sleeping at home every day is nice, but not so much if you’re only *at *home for 9 hours per 24.

39

All true.

As well, different aircraft are on different lease arrangements. And just like a consumer car lease, there are expectations about utilization. If one airplane is being overused versus the contract, it’ll be moved to spare duty for a couple weeks to “rest” and let its stable-mates catch up.

Likewise (as I mentioned above) aircraft need overhauls every so often based on both calendar time and utilization. If you’re planning to overhaul this one in the Fall after the summer rush is over, but it’s accumulating hours & cycles too quickly & will run out in August instead, best to have it do spare duty for a couple weeks to “stretch” the remaining hours / cycles to reach the scheduled overhaul date.

I have seen short-sighted managements foul this up and end up with aircraft (or crews) that got over-utilized for awhile and are now parked and legally unusable while the schedule collapses into a shambles as too few aircraft & people try to cover too much work.

There are a lot of interlocking pieces in this 10-dimesional jigsaw puzzle.

40

For short hauls, you also have to consider environmental factors: Aloha Airlines Flight 243 - Wikipedia