Originally Posted by
davidjohnson6
Yes, a 737 is a complicated machine... but there are enough passengers on an average flight who have a decent brain and can follow sentences of more than 10 multi-syllable words. At least try to explain the issue - some pax will understand (and explain to pax travelling with them)... and pilots will be accorded due respect.
This is a big NO, from me ‘operational/weather/tech is more than adequate. But if you want a fire starter for a terminal riot here’s how to do it.
It’s Christmas Eve, literally, and for the benefit of the story. You’re in ops and the redcaps and the dispatch/turnaround teams are working like slaves with the last few flights in filthy weather, both in blighty and across Europe, fog and widespread snow.
The last return rotation outbound LHR to Zurich has just gone tech, it’s a 737-700 (your type ma vary round trip fuel on board) and they’ve got a leading edge slat disagree and they’re talking to the spannerw@nkers who suggest bringing it back on stand for them to scratch and sniff. This is done and pax stay on board whilst the clock ticks away towards a no go time due insufficient turn round due airport closure at ZRH and the crew looking forward to sectors 4/5 of a day that would be shaded brown if you were color coding them. The engineers decide it’s £ucked, leaving a bloke working on it. So Xmas eve and you offload the pax with no aircraft to put them on, and the joy of trying to find hotels/taxis/coaches to transport them if there’s no solution.
However inbound you have a 1 hr delayed 737-300 (standby crew) which is due to go to Inverness and back which is just touching down. Your INV pax having followed’their’ plane on FR24 are smug that they are soon on their way.
So how easy is it going to be to tell them that their aircraft is going to be stolen with its crew to go to Switzerland, and that their ‘replacement’ is currently tech (might be repaired, dunno yet) with a crew running out of hours and unsurprisingly not prepared to go into discretion. You have to swap the aircraft and crew, as flight deck not cross rated between variants.
Meanwhile in Zurich the redcaps are beating off angry pax who want to know when they’re leaving, they know the airport closes and doesn’t do ‘extensions’ and its Christmas Eve..
Or you could run the INV as planned, hope the ZRH comes on line as the spanner’s have just advised you they think they’ll have sorted it in about 45mins. However if you do that the timing means you won’t have enough time to onload the return pax within curfews, so it’ll be land offload, and depart MT to get the aircraft and crew back in time so the aircraft is in the right location for the next days flying program, and to ensure it flies the right sequence of flights to get into its C check in two days time, without any subsequent positioning flights to get in the right place. And if you do that you’ve got to find transport and Hotac for 150 ZRH pax on Christmas Eve, and a separate hotel for the crew, you’re not going to put them in with a bunch of cancelled pax on Christmas Eve are you?
There you go. A fairly typical LCC day at the office.
Operational Reasons.
Sorted.