Originally Posted by
davidjohnson6
LCCs as we all know need high utilisation from their aircraft to make a profit - quite common for aircraft to push back from gate at 0630 but not open the doors for arriving pax to disembark at the end of an evening at 2330
In general, LCCs in Europe do not fly overnight - I know there are a few exceptions. Thus if an aircraft was due to land at its home base at 2300 but runs an hour late, there is a built-in safety buffer as the aircraft won't see any pax boarding before maybe 6 am
Some airports in Europe have strict night curfews (eg Berlin) while others are more liberal which creates temptation for an airline to start to squeeze the overnight catch-up delay buffer (subject to slot availability and airports being open)
After the last pax has disembarked, how long does it take before the last crewmember can disembark and the aircraft door be closed for the night ? How long before the first pax embarks in the morning will the aircraft needs to be on site ? Or to put it another way, how big is the overnight catch-up delay buffer for LCCs like Easyjet, Ryanair, Wizz and others, and how much more utilisation could in practice be squeezed out of their aircraft fleet before jeopardising the early morning departure wave ?
i can answer this in a few parts because there are a few questions in it.
after the last passenger gets off it normally takes the crew around 10-15mins to do their security searches to ensure that everything has been removed from the aircraft that should be. In this time both the cabin crew and flight deck might hand over the aircraft to the engineers who need to complete a daily check of the aircraft. If straight forward this probably only takes a further half hour - however if they come across problems then it can take a lot longer.
The aircraft are also required to on certain days of the week to have a 3day check and a 7day check - (this might be different at each airline depending on their SOP’s.) the 3 day check takes longer than the daily and the 7 day longer again. On a A330 the weekly check normally takes 3-4hours. This is why aircraft don’t fly the same route pattern each day and week and another reason why they swap down route with other aircraft so that it can maybe go to a bigger base for the night where the weekly check is carried out.
after the crew got off the aircraft is required to be cleaned and the catering removed. Most LCC’s get an outside company to do a proper clean of
the aircraft at night time as normally it would only have been cleaned by the cabin crew during the day. Again depending on size of aircraft and how dirty it is and the airlines Stipulation for how it should be cleaned such as all surfaces wiped down or just the tray tables then this also adds time. A normal clean should take 30-45mins with a team of 5 cleaners.
Once this is done then that should be the aircraft finished with for the night unless it needs repositioned to another stand for the morning.
A bog standard example would be if the aircraft arrived at midnight out would be expected to have everything completed and shut down for the night by 2am as obviously depending upon workload some engineers may not get on to do their checks straight away nor may the cleaners.
hope this helps.