Originally Posted by
DutchBird-757
About the charters. I wished they would use the aircraft during the weekends and make money with them rather than having them sitting idle somewhere.
Doing weekend charters are a real difficulty for LCY-based operators.
If you do them with aircraft which weekend at the outstations, you will get difficulties with crew hours from a non-base, and not being able to start the charter until the aircraft turns up on Saturday lunchtime, while wanting the aircraft back by Sunday lunchtime, a combination there is not much demand for. Moreover BACF will not be a well-known operator there.
If you do charters starting from LCY, you need to be gone before Saturday lunchtime and not back until after Sunday lunchtime, which when fitted in with the schedules gives some very restrictive options for scheduling.
Scheduling a 12 noon Saturday departure out of London City is a real moment of tension, if you are not gone by the time the curfew comes in the whole charter is lost and that will be the end of any more business from that customer.
Football charters would be an obvious market for LCY, out on Saturday morning, were it not for the fact that you can't come back on Saturday night (so what's the point of going by air ?), and have to be in quite precisely on Sunday ready for the schedules.