Originally Posted by Mr A Tis
The Aer Arran Manchester to Nantes was about five hours late Sunday 30th July,( arriving Nantes 0215 Monday !). What caused this huge delay on such a short flight? The Aer Arran web-site boasts how punctual they are. If there was a tech issue, surely there was scope to draft in a replacement ship?
I think it's reasonable to assume that this was a knock-on delay from earlier, i.e. the aircraft was not holding aloft for five hours as your reference to "such a short flight" might suggest.
I don't know yesterday's exact circumstances, but here are a couple of general factors:
- It's quite easy for a short initial delay to snowball into a longer one. The engineers think it'll take 30 minutes to fix the tech problem - it ends up taking an hour. Then you miss your departure slot so have to wait another 30 minutes. You realise that your crew is going to be out of hours when they return and can't operate their next scheduled rotation, so you have to call in a standby crew - assuming that Sod's Law hasn't dictated that your standby crew(s) aren't already out.
- if you know in advance that you're going to have a five-hour delay, you can plan for that (calling out Titan or Flightline or someone with a replacement aircraft), but "rolling delays" are the worst - for passengers and for ops.
- an airline of Aer Arann's size may have some standby capacity, but as Sunday evening is a peak time for flying, there's a fair chance that all the available aircraft are already scheduled at that time so it becomes necessary to find a chartered-in alternative.
- it's been a while since I was involved
in this kind of thing, but at a guess if you were to call up e.g. Titan and say "I need a MAN-NTE-MAN rotation, as soon as possible" on a July Sunday evening," they'd have an RJ100 aircraft ready to launch from MAN within a couple of hours and would charge you - oh, I don't know, not far off £10k? - for the privilege. So if you're the Ops controller and you're already an hour into the delay (i.e. the engineers have just told you it'll take an hour to fix the aircraft rather than 30 minutes), you now have a choice: call out the spare aircraft (Titan etc), burn off the airline's entire profit for the day by doing so, and delay everyone by another two hours, or hope that you can recover the programme with the existing fleet. That's not a straightforward call.
You comment that the Aer Arann (it's one
r and two
ns, incidentally) website "boasts how punctual they are" as if this is incompatible with having any delays. Surely it's about finding a balance? They could achieve near-100% punctuality if they had a spare aircraft at every airport they serve, ready to go at a moment's notice. And they'd be bankrupt within weeks.
Being a passenger stuck in a five-hour delay is pretty horrific, especially if staff aren't doing a good job of communicating what's happening (topical example: a friend flew in from Barcelona rather late on Saturday night/Sunday morning after appalling delays there), and there's no way to defend a lack of communication and support from staff once a delay happens. However, trying to make money in a price-sensitive regional airline environment means making tough decisions like: "having a standby aircraft at peak hours will cost us £x million in annual costs but it means that our average delay of our delayed flights will go down from (e.g.) 35 minutes to 25 minutes - but in order to compete on price, we need to keep our costs down, so we can't afford a standby aircraft."
I have no link to Aer Arann and don't know what went on last night. For all I know, they could have known from the start that there would be a five-hour delay, but cared too little to bother doing anything proactive about it.
But somehow I suspect that the situation was rather less black-and-white.
Hope that helps.
C.