BA A380 at Gatwick

[mastafreighter]

BA A380 G-XLEB just positioned at Gatwick from Heathrow for overnight parking before departing to Manila at 0500hrs Sunday for heavy maintenance. Apparently no slot at LHR tomorrow for a similar time departure.

[DaveReidUK]

Interesting. Heathrow's runways aren't typically busy at 5am on a Sunday morning, or at that time any other day come to that.

[Wycombe]

Presumably a 5am departure from LL would mean use of a night slot though?

[Westlakejawa]

Approx 6 600 miles is this the nearest maintenance facility available to carry out the work. Rather an expensive exercise.

[DaveReidUK]

Presumably a 5am departure from LL would mean use of a night slot though?

If you mean the Night Quota, the Winter season typically ends with a couple of hundred movements unused out of the season's quota, so a single extra departure wouldn't create any problem.

[DaveReidUK]

Approx 6 600 miles is this the nearest maintenance facility available to carry out the work. Rather an expensive exercise.

Not necessarily.

The aircraft doesn't always position from/to the UK, it will sometimes operate the LHR-SIN schedule and then fly on to Manila for the check, with the A380 coming off the previous check operating the return SIN-LHR. Of course that only works when two consecutive checks are scheduled.

[Skipness One Foxtrot]

Why not leave after the night restriction period? Is there an issue at the MNL end?

[champair79]

Yes, there is a very specific time window that the A380 can arrive into MNL. Usually this isn’t an issue when they swap A380s in SIN but as DaveReidUK alluded to, there isn’t one to swap with at the moment.

champ

[southern duel]

Night flights at heathrow are restricted. Cargo flights unless carrying livestock and maintenance flights are banned until 06:01 local time.
This will explain why no slot is available from LHR. Slots at 06.01 to 07.00 are quite heavily utilised with departures already.

[DaveReidUK]

Night flights at heathrow are restricted. Cargo flights unless carrying livestock and maintenance flights are banned until 06:01 local time.
This will explain why no slot is available from LHR. Slots at 06.01 to 07.00 are quite heavily utilised with departures already.

We must be talkng about a different Heathrow. :O

Night flights at heathrow are restricted.

Yes, as discussed above, there is a Night Quota, but that has sufficient headroom to allow ad-hoc flights without breaching the limit.

Cargo flights unless carrying livestock and maintenance flights are banned until 06:01 local time.
This will explain why no slot is available from LHR.

Positioning flights to/from maintenance before 06:00 are unusual, but not unknown. The Night Quota restrictions don't make any distinction between those and passenger flights.

Slots at 06.01 to 07.00 are quite heavily utilised with departures already.

No, there are typically only about a dozen takeoffs before 07:00 (and half that number on Sundays), compared to around 45 departures per hour during most of the day.

[Diverskii]

Due to MNL's very strict A380 restrictions, it is not unusual for BA's A380s to fly SIN-CRK, and then position CRK-MNL after a few hours waiting in CRK.