Originally Posted by
tophat27dt
I am curious to know how an airline thinks when it must consider routine maintenance and unserviceabilities. A large airline would always have a spare aircraft on standby, but how does a base with 5 aircraft plan on that? Or is it an acceptable gamble versus screwing the passengers?
I would say that in general you don't have spare base availability but you do have spare fleet availability which you use to firefight any unservicability as and where it crops up. You should have no peak season major maintenance planned and routine work and allowable defect rectification would be carried out overnight by your line maintenance engineers, these being either in-house or contractors. That's how it was in my experience some time ago anyway.