Last night Sunday while on the way back from a few days at our villa in Cyprus I witnessed and experienced one of most strange and confusing crewing/operational things I have ever seen.
TOM have lots of flights arriving into PFO on a Sunday evening and do aircraft swaps on quite a frequent basis. Last night the inbound 757 (BE) from BHX arrived just before 23:00 local and was to be swapped with a 757 (EU) coming in from Luton great untll the LTN flight picks up a delay of 2hrs30 mins.
So to me the obvious thing would have been to cancel the aircraft swap but oh no Thomson came up with another idea due to duty hours lets send the BHX aircraft(BE) and crew back to Birmingham but with the Luton pax onboard to then coach them back to LTN.
The Poor old BHX pax including us had to wait around until 01:40 to leave and got back to BHX at 04:00 what made things even worse was TOM then ferried the original LTN aircraft (EU) back there to operate this mornings series of flights.
To me and the cabin crew onboard we agreed cannot see logistically why ops did this as had all the additional cost of coaching BHX=LTN along with the fuel to ferry the aircraft back.