Originally Posted by
Shaggy Sheep Driver
It must have been very expensive to operate - a second aeroplane and crew standing by just in case the first one filled up.
I can assure you that the control team were experts at demand prediction for each flight, and certainly did not just hang around to see what happened. There were a whole range of techniques to handle it. Nor was there just a second aircraft - I can recall on occasion there needing to be third ones - which were always to hand.
I understand the key reason it was wound down was the whole approach was just incompatible with yield management. Certainly at the beginning I understood they had a special arrangement with the slot co-ordinators for backups to be accepted.
The worst "disaster" was the first year of the Belfast Shuttle, on Christmas Eve. Traditionally people had booked to go home to Ireland for the holiday, and as flights filled they would have to go one or two days earlier. This wasn't necessary of course once the Shuttle started. The control team saw it coming but not the extent to which everybody turned up right at the end on the last evening, with the whole of BA European then shutting down for Christmas Day and about 600 people left at the end of the evening. The Long-haul division, who still had ops going on, came to the rescue, and operated two 747s over to Belfast early on Christmas morning.
Concorde was used as a reserve on one of the shuttles, either the Manchester or Glasgow one
These did happen from time to time, generally as some form of promotion to get the attention of the press (which it always did). I believe it was just mixed in with some Concorde training requirement. The
PR team never revealed that they didn't loop out over the sea to go supersonic, so the journalists generally made this up !