Originally Posted by
ECAMACTIONSCOMPLETE
I just watched her presentation from the CAPA conference earlier in the month, when pressed on the fleet transition from A320 to 737 and how long that would take she answered ‘a year or so... a few years.’ Surely for a low cost carrier with only 15 airframes to have a split fleet for what may be up to 4-5 years (given the transition started 18-24 months ago) this is terribly inefficient.
A conversion time from one type such as the A320 to the B737 for a fleet of 15 aircraft will be dependent on the management of surplus of flight crew and maintenance staff, as well as finances. Short haul operators average 4 to 5 crews per aircraft dependent on the employment contracts and FTLs. Reducing operating aircraft will not give as many spare crews as long haul does for entering training activity. Management usually is much less than 10% of the total manpower, so does not add greatly to the available manpower, but does assist in the early stages while qualifying training staff.
Normal leave coverage provides some slack, if the crew training can be negotiated to occur in lieu of annual leave. That at best may add up to 10% crew availability for entering training. To do that, the management would need to have good relationships with crewing. The type training and line training is going to be in the order of 60 days to complete processing. To that end, the 15 aircraft fleet will be able to work up to transitioning around 7.5/2 crews per month using leave allocations only, which is about 1 aircraft worth of transition a month without too much stress. If you add some management to the current and new flying to release crews to training, then that can be increased by a couple of crews, but that would be about it, making for 1 plane a month being a practical rate of transition, without adding additional staff in a surge through contract or other source. Going to contract on either type increases ramp up rate. There is still an initial delay in process to achieve approvals for the initial crews, adding to the front end time.
Transitioning from the 320 to the 737 without using extra crewing is going to to a year long program at the minimum, and up to 15-18 months for a fleet of Tigers size. Add enough additional crew, and it can be done as fast as aircraft can be delivered, if the line training staff are on hand, but they will usually be the bottle neck. Going from the 320 to 737 is going to be faster and more reliable in outcome that doing the other way round... Company policy and Regulatory guidelines add to the IOE training time which will be unique to each operator, with short haul doing well if the controlling factor is sectors, and less so if they are hours flown, compared to long haul.
Maintenance is a bottle neck, dependent on the regulatory licensing requirements. AF & PP courses will remove staff from current activity, putting demand on oversight and specialists, and could be just as limiting or more so than the flight crew.