Originally Posted by
GBYAJ
Thanks for the above comments.
just one further “out of interest” query, how does it work for the crews? There may be aircraft changes scheduled in advance but for others how far in advance do crews get notice? So for example if a NCL and MAN based 738 need to swap for a maintenance issue would the crews change aircraft at the outstation so that they end up back at their base but on a different aircraft or could the crew on the aircraft just be told they are going back to MAN rather than NCL. Always wondered!
It depends on what sort of swapping they are doing. Ideally, operationally and from a money perspective, they would want to swap it "down route" whereby the crews from NCL/MAN in your scenario arrive and depart at the same time. They arrive, swap over, and aircraft go back to new bases crew back to their own bases. Makes it cheaper/easier for crews too. Passengers will notice not a blind bit of difference.
Sometimes you may look and go what the hell is going on when they do a three way swap. This could be that the NCL/MAN flying programmes are not aligned. So they may swap an AC that is CWL based first then CWL/MAN swap later in the week. It all depends how aligned the programmes/flying is aligned with other bases. I would say only last resort do airlines position something. Certainly where I work it's not frowned upon but we are encouraged to do our very best to just straight swap things about.