SAS's Airbus A321, where are they now and why?

[Conor.M]

I live in south west London, but I'm currently working in Copenhagen so I've spent a lot of time flying on BA and SAS aircraft in the last 12 months. Until a few months ago the SAS flight on a Monday morning was more often then not an MD-90 and the return flight on a Friday afternoon was an Airbus A321. Currently the route seems to be flown exclusively using MD-80s.

I appreciate SAS are currently restructuring and are aiming to assign specific fleet types to each of the new SAS regions, but does anyone know what routes the A321s are now operating?

Additionally, does anyone have any ideas what the economic reasons where for pulling the Airbus from the London - Copenhagen route. I'm not exactly knowledgeable about passenger numbers on SAS's other routes, but they never seemed to have a problem filling the extra seats on the A321 on a Friday evening.

Cheers in advance.

[ATMspecialist]

The A321 operates some of the daily schedules between OSL-ARN, OSL-CPH and ARN-CPH. You can also find them on the CPH-FRA route. Could be other services they use these ships on as well, but these I know.

Cheers,
AS

[WHBM]

Airlines that have a range of aircraft types do tend to switch them round from time to time to optimise things, as the loads and markets change. Just a quick look at the SAS 321 usage shows they have just changed it all again. Until last week they were using the aircraft heavily on the Copenhagen to Stockholm shuttle. Next week, with the summer schedules and reduced business demand, it has gone altogether from that route (flights still there but using smaller aircraft).However they are now onto European routes from Copenhagen, to Nice, Rome, Madrid, Frankfurt, Athens, and yes, back to Heathrow on the evening SK 1507 ! Then in August they're switching it to a morning London flight, and the Stockholm flights restart for it.

Someone will have some logic somewhere !

[WHBM]

By a complete coincidence, having answered this question last night, I was driving home along the M4 past Heston services at 1915 this evening, glanced across to what chanced to be passing on finals for 27R - and there was the SAS A321 from Copenhagen aforementioned coming in on what is its first flight into Heathrow of the summer schedule.

:)