Emerald are all over the place these days. When there are nights where 3 or more aircraft end up in Aldergrove then something is badly wrong. Even the following morning it seems to take several hours to simply position the aircraft back down to City then the groundhog day starts again, they don't seem capable to regain any semblance of a schedule.
City seems to have adopted a very strict curfew, the 11pm cutoff is potentially causing more harm than it solves though. To the best of my knowledge this is a self imposed curfew and not the planning one which used to have midnight as the cutoff time. Seems somewhat bloody minded to alienate the airport customers by landing them in Aldergrove at 1115 and then bussing them down to get their cars followed by the shambles the next morning in repositioning aircraft etc when it would have been legal and legitimate to land at City? I remember FlyBe regularly landing after 11pm. Maybe there has been a change in planning agreements though, not sure.
Emerald Ops don't seem to help themselves either though, looking at FR24, many times aircraft land early evening that could operate one of the delayed sectors but they seem to just keep holding off for the delayed aircraft to do the planned sectors - end result is then a late night Aldergrove arrival! Does no-one in Ops have the ability to take a more fluid approach? Just because an airframe was planned to do A-B then C-D, surely it can be changed to manage the overall delay and potentially have all airframes back in City before curfew.
Overall a strange way to win and keep passengers. A business man delayed for 3 hours on a day trip will think twice before booking again. Leisure passengers arriving back in Aldergorve on a Sunday night at midnight and then hanging about for another few hours to get their cars from City before working on Monday morning will think twice before booking again. If people lose confidence in a product they will simply look elsewhere, a pity really because the potential is there for a successful regional connection. I think Emerald need to have a long and hard think about how to turn their fortunes around, whether its better asset planning or more reliable aircraft or maybe a mixture of both.