Originally Posted by
davidjohnson6
Is rescheduling to several hours earlier due to weather allowed ? Is this allowed on PSO routes ? Is there a piece of law which makes this difficult for airlines ? Does pre-emptively making commercial pax flights a few hours earlier to avoid bad weather ever happen ?
Can’t say it’s never done but in thirty plus years of long haul it never happened to me and practically it would be very difficult in many cases. Leaving aside the issue of airport slots, noise curfews, contacting all the passengers who have tickets to travel a couple of other reasons I can think of:
If the flight is an early AM one moving the departure time forward may infringe the crew’s legal overnight rest requirements - many night stops or even overnight turns at base on short haul these days are already down to minimum hours at accommodation so there is no scope to move timings forward.
If it is not a first flight of the day for crew/machine how does the planned retiming fit in with the sector the aircraft (and possibly crew ) are planned to do before the sector you are trying to change?
I suppose both the above are consequences of how tightly crew and aircraft are scheduled at the llarge operators….there often isn’t any wriggle room in the schedules to start shifting flight timings significantly and often the simplest answer for the operator is to simply cancel the sector(s) directly effected.