Hi Ozzy, the reason that your question was put in here is because professional pilots do not follow airline schedules! They follow the list of sectors that they must operate. When working long haul they do not connect to other flights because, when they arrive, they are going to go to the hotel and sleep and then ... usually operate the return sector to where they started. So they will not know what it is like to connect at Zurich. (I pick that as an example because someone asked about connection times in Zurich just the other week. They were on a very tight time schedule and within a couple of days, there were replies from people who travel through ZRH every week.)
The folks in here are not spotters (is that an anorak I hear rustling in the wardrobe???
) but the folks who do what you are planning to do and have done it for some time. We know about all the carriers that operate between most city pairs and if we don't know them - we know where to look for the information.
In this happy cabin of PPRuNe (as we like to think of ourselves
) you have people who might travel on 100+ sectors a year to many different countries. They know which airports are slow for connections and where you might not be able to stay Airside, however much you might want to. We get questions every week about carriers, fares, airports and connection/transfer times at airports from London to Sydney to Hong Kong.
The pilots don't know airports from the pasenger perspective - of course they travel through some when they are on vacation but they have not built up the day to day usage reports that we generate in here.There are all the nations of the world in this fabulous forum that can give you expert local knowledge ... and you just insulted them all by asking to talk to the Pilots???
Welcome aboard
