Up until not to long ago one could book flights that departed at almost any time. On many, many occasions I flew on 11pm or even 2am flights. It was great. The airport was dead. You could get through security like shot through a gun. And the flights were a bit cheaper. And the inside of the plane was quieter as people didn’t flap their lips as much in the late hour and there weren’t many kids on board.
Now, the latest flight out of Milwaukee I can find for any destination is 8:30pm.
WTF?
The only thing I can think of is there weren’t enough folks taking the red eyes to make them profitable for the airlines.
But I’d think there would, at very least, be 1 or 2 running. There aren’t any. None. Zip.
While the OP’s points about the benefits of red-eyes are good, unless I’m flying further than 8 hours I don’t think they are very convenient.
There’s still a red-eye from Los Angeles to Boston. I took it in April. That’s not a fun flight. It’s 5 hours, so I couldn’t get a good sleep on the plane, and then I arrived in the morning in Boston, so I couldn’t sleep then, either. I had to spend the whole next day extremely tired. I’m flying to Boston tomorrow (yay grad school!) and I chose the day flight.
That’s odd. I can practically throw a rock at Mitchell International from where I’m sitting right now (if I didn’t mind breaking a window), I see flights coming and going all night…I think. I guess I’m kind of desensitized as I don’t really pay much attention to it anymore. I suppose it could very well be true, a few years back I found myself at O’Hare around midnight and the place was totally shut down. The plane broke down and there was literally no one to help us. I’m fairly sure they had to call someone in to deal with the plane full of people that were wandering around an empty terminal trying to figure out what to do.
I suppose it’s just much less busy at night, I know when I go outside to smoke I see* planes landing and taking off all night but it’s nothing like it is during the day when they’re lined up 3 or 4 deep on the runway waiting to take off (I work across the street from the airport and watch them all day).
*See, as in overhead. I work on Layton ave so I can actually, physically, see the airport, but I live off of Pennsylvania and College so I can’t actually see the airport but I can see planes at low altitudes.
Looking at MKE’s website, it does seem that most (all?) departures seem to stop around 9pm or so and start back up around 5am. My guess is that I’m seeing charters/private planes, connecting flights and military planes. Also, I suppose I’m seeing more arrivals at night then departures. I don’t usually pay very close attention.
That actually makes a lot of sense, they tend to take off and land from a different runway that would make them more visible (on both take off and landing) from my house. They both (UPS and FedEx) have terminals at one end of a specific runway that they can taxi right into/out of without having to turn.
There are plenty of red-eye flights from the west coast (e.g. Los Angeles, San Francisco) to the east coast (e.g. New York, Washington, Boston). Probably it’s just a matter of what the market desires.
Yeah; my suspicion is that domestic red-eyes are now largely limited to flights to and from the big airports (and, probably, longer eastbound flights, at that).
There are still plenty of red-eyes. I took one (begrudgingly) just last week. I would easily believe there are fewer, though (supply and demand and all that).
They are naturally more common eastbound than westbound, and they are more common the longer the flight. If you are thinking specifically about Milwaukee’s Mitchell Airport, it’s location isn’t conducive to long, east-bound flights. You can’t cross more than a single timezone boundary with any of the offered flights, and the longest flight to the Eastern Time Zone is probably only 3.5 hours or so (to Florida).
Inbound is a different story, since you could come from the West Coast (two time zones) on a potentially longer flight. Checking LAX–>MKE, I see four red-eye options across three airlines. Only one is direct (AirTran), but that’s because Delta and AA presumably have no direct LAX–>MKE flights at any time of day, and their red-eyes pass through their respective MSP and DFW hubs.
I’ve lived in the Milwaukee area all my life (51 years on Halloween) and have been on oodles of red-eyes both east and west coast bound. All of my international flights have been from out of somewhere else.
Up until, about 18 months ago, the cheapest flights have been out of MKE at 11PM, 1:30AM, or 2AM, regardless of direction. Suddenly (the last year or 2) there hasn’t been anything after 9PM.
I’m surprised that non-necessary flights in the middle of the night in densly populated areas are allowed at all - or are all your airports way outside the cities? Because here, there’s a time between IIRC 2 and 5 am when no flights leave at all so that the people living nearby (bought their houses before knowing a new airport would be built there) can get some sleep.
Arthur Haley mentioned that far back in the 70s in his novel Airport, about a group of angry citizens talkign to the airport manager about noise levels, and how with more airports being built for rising air traffic, this problem would be excarbated.
Well, seeing that Mitchell has been around since the 1920’s, and that the majority of flights take off over Lake Michigan…who cares? I want my El’cheapo, quiet flights.
constanze: This is America; the idea that anything stands in the way of commerce is viewed as silly. I exaggerate but only a bit. Curfews do exist here and there, but as a rule the airport comes first. Aircraft operate as quietly as possible and the people below put up with it.
OP (pkbites): MKE used to be the home of Midwest Express. Despite the “express” in the name, they weren’t the minor-league feeder to some major carrier; they were their own dog. This was an airline with a unique approach to competing in the industry. They’re gone now.
All the major carriers I’ve worked for have only had a smattering of “redeye”, which was almost always far west departures to eastern destinations. Usually leaving between 11 & midnight local out west & arriving more or less at sunrise.
I’m going to speculate that what little other redeye ops there once were have been priced out of the market. With the advent of the internet we can now sell almost every seat on almost every plane. And the customers beat the price down to at/below breakeven on most flights most days at most times. There isn’t financial room to operate half-full airplanes at even lower fares regardless of time of day.
Fuel & direct-touch labor are about 50% of the carrier’s total costs. Even though they get free extra utilization out of the facilities & sometimes the aircraft, the economics still don’t work. Some aircraft are leased on a *fixed cost per month *basis, and others are leased on a *fixed cost per usage hour *basis. The latter leases are becoming much more common in the industry and probably have a bunch to do with the reduction in marginal flying. When the overnight use of the jet itself was free that helped subsidize the half-empty airplane & low fares. When it isn’t, well …
According to FlightAware, last night at least the arrivals at General Mitchell Int’l Airport show a gap between about 1:40AM and 4:30AM:
Ident Type Origin Departure Arrival
FDX1783 B752 Indianapolis Intl (KIND) Fri 04:58AM EDT Fri 04:40AM CDT
TRS246 B737 Seattle-Tacoma Intl (KSEA) Thu 11:06PM PDT Fri 04:31AM CDT
USC311 PA31 St Paul Holman Fld (KSTP) Fri 12:13AM CDT Fri 01:41AM CDT
FRG2777 B190 Hawkins Field (KHKS) Thu 10:55PM CDT Fri 01:40AM CDT
Departures show an even bigger gap:
Ident Type Destination Departure Arrival
COM306 CRJ1 Detroit Metro Wayne Co (KDTW) Fri 05:47AM CDT Fri 07:29AM EDT
AWI3777 CRJ2 Charlotte/Douglas Intl (KCLT) Fri 05:46AM CDT Fri 08:23AM EDT
SKW5467 CRJ2 Chicago O’Hare Intl (KORD) Fri 05:01AM CDT Fri 05:19AM CDT
USC311 PA31 South Bend Rgnl (KSBN) Fri 01:58AM CDT Fri 02:58AM EDT
EJA661 C56X Dupage (KDPA) Fri 12:29AM CDT Fri 12:48AM CDT
N100NG F900 Stevens Point Muni (KSTE) Thu 11:19PM CDT Thu 11:41PM CDT
FDX1683 B722 Indianapolis Intl (KIND) Thu 10:38PM CDT Fri 12:16AM EDT
Note that this includes cargo flights (e.g., the Fedex planes going to and from Indianapolis) and bizjets (e.g., ExecJets flight 661 flying a Cessna Citation to Chicago DuPage Airport). So it seems that MKE does essentially shut down in the wee hours of the AM.
OTOH, Continental 1597 left LAX last night at 11:50PM and got in to Newark at 8:11AM this morning, and American flight 30 left LAX at 11:45pm and landed at JFK at 8:10am, so the coast-to-coast red-eye is alive and well.
And this was the rationale behind a lot of the red-eye runs. The airlines were already flying cargo, so it made sense to add a flight attendent and sell a few seats.
Now FedEx and UPS have pretty much taken over the next-day delivery service, and the major airlines are focusing almost entirely on passenger service.
Another factor is that with discount carriers, you can get a cheap (or at least cheap enough) fare at more convenient times.
When I listen to airplanes they still sound extremely loud, and noise from airports is cited usually as example of noise making people physically ill. Although in the novel mentioned, Haley did mention that future technological developments might reduce noise, but I don’t know hard data.
America might have airports out in the boons so that take-off is over a lake or otherwise uninhabited area, esp. out West with sparser populations, so that could explain flights from certain airports.
Most American airports are located far from the city center. There are some jurisdictions that do restrict nighttime flights. For example, National Airport in Arlington, Va., is right in the middle of the Washington, D.C., conurbation and it shuts down early so as to limit noise pollution at night. However, Dulles International Airport, which is located 40 minutes’ drive from the city center, is subject to fewer such restrictions, since many fewer people live close to it.
A WAG but rising fuel costs are probably also a factor. An airline used to be able to make a profit with a flight that was half empty and had discounted tickets. Now they need to sell every seat to meet the overhead. They’ve got to get as many passengers as possible into the fewest possible flights.
Another common kind of red-eye flights are the ones going from the East Coast of the U.S. to Europe. Several times I’ve flown from BWI to Heathrow overnight.
