Originally Posted by
Reversethrustset
Do they? Since when? I fly from a large base and not one aircraft disappears for the day and comes back in the evening, it's either 2 sector days or 4 sector days, out back, out back. BRS & LGW are no different. 6 slot pairs for BRS will be a maximum 2 aircraft and for 12 slot pairs it's a maximum of 4 aircraft, infact, 1 aircraft can do 8 departures per day so it could even be 1 for BRS and 2 for LGW.
There are even aircraft based in BFS that sometimes do 10 sectors per day. Shorter sectors I know but not unheard of.
in terms of leaving based and not coming back until the night this is generally untrue - normally it is there and back. There used to be some rostered patterns to increased crew hours and sectors so that they flew 3 sectors e.g
aircraft 1 - BFS - AGP - LGW - BFS with a BFS based crew.
aircraft 2 - LGW - AGP - BFS - LGW with a LGW based crew.
This was because from BFS it is very hard to roster 4 sectors to Europe due to crew operating hours however I am not sure if this happens anymore.