Originally Posted by
GBYAJ
Been keeping an eye on the TUI NCL movements on FR24 and if I was still standing on the airport roof - and getting regs for a log book (1980’s esque ) would love the variety of aircraft visiting and swapping. In other years TUI have usually based 3 737’s and swapped them every few months at most. Bearing in mind the comments above is there a specific reason for all these swaps this year. Is it more engineers available at NCL than elsewhere, or less engineers available so aircraft can’t stay long or any other reasons (some insight would be interesting pleae).
Sometimes it's more to do with hours that an aircraft is flying, swapping it out of NCL to say LGW means it could over a week save 10 hours on flights over the course of 7 days and 2 sectors each - given the much shorter flight times from LGW than NCL.
Other times it's required a hangar input/visit (basically like your car service) which NCL doesn't have or requires a service check which again NCL engineers don't have the facility to do.
Some of the time the aircraft is flying around with a defect (Or ADD) and is flying in accordance to the MEL (minimum equipment list) which is all find and dandy. However they do have limits (hours/cycles) and some airlines will push these defects up until the limit of these limits before fixing the defect providing they can not be done in base. Sometimes a defect can be cleared in base such as NCL but engineers may request it to be somewhere they have heavy MX facilities incase the problem could result in further investigations/problems arising and therefore the aircraft been effectively grounded. Better to do that where you have heavy MX facilities than do it where you don't.