LCC overnight buffer

[davidjohnson6]

LCCs as we all know need high utilisation from their aircraft to make a profit - quite common for aircraft to push back from gate at 0630 but not open the doors for arriving pax to disembark at the end of an evening at 2330

In general, LCCs in Europe do not fly overnight - I know there are a few exceptions. Thus if an aircraft was due to land at its home base at 2300 but runs an hour late, there is a built-in safety buffer as the aircraft won't see any pax boarding before maybe 6 am

Some airports in Europe have strict night curfews (eg Berlin) while others are more liberal which creates temptation for an airline to start to squeeze the overnight catch-up delay buffer (subject to slot availability and airports being open)

After the last pax has disembarked, how long does it take before the last crewmember can disembark and the aircraft door be closed for the night ? How long before the first pax embarks in the morning will the aircraft needs to be on site ? Or to put it another way, how big is the overnight catch-up delay buffer for LCCs like Easyjet, Ryanair, Wizz and others, and how much more utilisation could in practice be squeezed out of their aircraft fleet before jeopardising the early morning departure wave ?

[LGS6753]

During summer, EZY have arrivals back in to LTN until about 0200, mainly from bucket & spade destinations.

Unlike some of the others, I have the impression that WZZ utilise their aircraft for longer. Perhaps because Eastern European clocks are ahead of UK and perhaps because there are fewer night-time restrictions there.

[USERNAME_]

At Thomas Cook we regularly had flights with no “buffer”.
As an example an aircraft might operate LGW-FUE-LGW at 7am, returning to Gatwick at 7pm. At 8pm it would operate LGW-DLM-LGW, returning to Gatwick at 6am, where it would then depart again at 7 to somewhere else.

[ROC10]

At Thomas Cook we regularly had flights with no “buffer”.
As an example an aircraft might operate LGW-FUE-LGW at 7am, returning to Gatwick at 7pm. At 8pm it would operate LGW-DLM-LGW, returning to Gatwick at 6am, where it would then depart again at 7 to somewhere else.


Is 12 hours not rather long for LGW-FUE-LGW? Generally around 3.5-4hrs each way, giving max of 8-8.5hrs flying plus an hour for turnaround gives around 9-9.5hrs for the whole return flight.

I guess not really relevant to the question though as TCX weren't a LCC.

[nowhereasfiled]

Is 12 hours not rather long for LGW-FUE-LGW? Generally around 3.5-4hrs each way, giving max of 8-8.5hrs flying plus an hour for turnaround gives around 9-9.5hrs for the whole return flight.

I guess not really relevant to the question though as TCX weren't a LCC.
See below
.
As an example.


Not the best example but this did happen at TC where an aircraft would arrive in the early hours and depart an hour later, but as stated TC is not a LCC so I digress.

Wizz, oddly even in the winter months, seem to have a much shorter buffer. For example, the late Sofia out of Luton doesn’t arrive until 0320 local, and in some instances is off again at 6 to another destination.
This morning G-WUKG arrived from St Petersburg at 0630 and was scheduled to depart to Belgrade at 0710.

[easyflyer83]

It all depends. Generally LCC’s like to have that overnight buffer so that MX and cleaning can be completed and also to enable the operation to start a fresh the next day.

With my carrier there are some exceptions. In summer my base has 0330 arrival and that, in theory, could be Airbourne again by 0630. There are also some nightstops across the network which obviously stray into the following day.

Crew disembark minutes after the last passenger.

Wizz seem to be different with quite a few sectors that can be classed as overnights/red eyes.

[irishlad06]

LCCs as we all know need high utilisation from their aircraft to make a profit - quite common for aircraft to push back from gate at 0630 but not open the doors for arriving pax to disembark at the end of an evening at 2330

In general, LCCs in Europe do not fly overnight - I know there are a few exceptions. Thus if an aircraft was due to land at its home base at 2300 but runs an hour late, there is a built-in safety buffer as the aircraft won't see any pax boarding before maybe 6 am

Some airports in Europe have strict night curfews (eg Berlin) while others are more liberal which creates temptation for an airline to start to squeeze the overnight catch-up delay buffer (subject to slot availability and airports being open)

After the last pax has disembarked, how long does it take before the last crewmember can disembark and the aircraft door be closed for the night ? How long before the first pax embarks in the morning will the aircraft needs to be on site ? Or to put it another way, how big is the overnight catch-up delay buffer for LCCs like Easyjet, Ryanair, Wizz and others, and how much more utilisation could in practice be squeezed out of their aircraft fleet before jeopardising the early morning departure wave ?


i can answer this in a few parts because there are a few questions in it.

after the last passenger gets off it normally takes the crew around 10-15mins to do their security searches to ensure that everything has been removed from the aircraft that should be. In this time both the cabin crew and flight deck might hand over the aircraft to the engineers who need to complete a daily check of the aircraft. If straight forward this probably only takes a further half hour - however if they come across problems then it can take a lot longer.

The aircraft are also required to on certain days of the week to have a 3day check and a 7day check - (this might be different at each airline depending on their SOP’s.) the 3 day check takes longer than the daily and the 7 day longer again. On a A330 the weekly check normally takes 3-4hours. This is why aircraft don’t fly the same route pattern each day and week and another reason why they swap down route with other aircraft so that it can maybe go to a bigger base for the night where the weekly check is carried out.

after the crew got off the aircraft is required to be cleaned and the catering removed. Most LCC’s get an outside company to do a proper clean of
the aircraft at night time as normally it would only have been cleaned by the cabin crew during the day. Again depending on size of aircraft and how dirty it is and the airlines Stipulation for how it should be cleaned such as all surfaces wiped down or just the tray tables then this also adds time. A normal clean should take 30-45mins with a team of 5 cleaners.

Once this is done then that should be the aircraft finished with for the night unless it needs repositioned to another stand for the morning.

A bog standard example would be if the aircraft arrived at midnight out would be expected to have everything completed and shut down for the night by 2am as obviously depending upon workload some engineers may not get on to do their checks straight away nor may the cleaners.

hope this helps.

[DaveReidUK]

Another, albeit minor, consideration is that arriving/departing in the small hours at some of the more obscure airports that LCCs use (often in the middle of nowhere) would leave passengers with ground transportation problems getting to/from where they really want to go.

[thetimesreader84]

Another factor is that, for seats sold on the open market (ie not part of a package deal - think easy, FR etc) there is a customer cut off at about 1.30-2am local time. Arriving before that time, most pax view it as possible to go home and get a few hours sleep before getting up for work later that same day. After that, the pax are looking at an extra day off work.

For package deals (Tui etc) you are booking from X date - Y date, so whatever gets you the most time away in that window is what most pax are after - if a flight landing at 4am gets you an extra day in resort, they’d probably take it.

Why the package logic didn’t apply to people booking their flights separately, the Revenue Management people didn’t know, although they had their theories. But their numbers reflected it, time & again.

[Dannyboy39]

This 'constant utilisation' LCC mantra is a bit overstated and most will start early in the morning and finish late at night, as that's when people want to fly! Charter airlines will do the odd night time IBZ / PMI / CFU / PFO in summer but this is an exception rather than a rule.

If aircraft were doing 16 hours and 8 cycles a day you're ragging the aircraft and increasing your maintenance costs massively (the engines especially), as well as not allowing yourself any sort of buffer for delays. Anecdotally, at their base, Ryanair turnaround times appear to be longer than easyJet's; it is just downroute where they try and do it within 25 minutes. easyJet cancelled 100s of flights this summer ex-LGW due to weather / ATC delays. Ryanair at least allow a bit of time back at base to catch up, which is wise.

Most airlines, not just LCCs are doing 10-11 FH / 3-4 FC a day on average in summer on their narrowbody fleet and probably averaging 8-9 FH / 2-3 FC in winter. Over a year, a narrowbody will be doing 2250-2500 FH / 700-1200 FC per annum, but this can vary massively by route profile.

Emirates actually do the most hours in any one day on average globally per aircraft.

[rog747]

Night holiday charter flights are the NORM in the summer lol not the exception!
Just toddle down to Palma or Rhodes and see for yourself on a hot summers night

Airlines like TUI may squeeze 4 rotations in to a 24 hour period - We did at Monarch back in the day, although 3 was the norm.
Court Line certainly did 4, but the routes were shorter then, like the nearer Med rather than today's medium hauls like Cyprus and Egypt,

As mentioned there has to be downtime during the week for Engineering checks but generally these were done at night or early hours of the morning before the first flight out.

IT charter aircraft are busy busy busy with little or no ''play catch up'' time available especially within smaller airlines who may have no way to bring in a spare -
We saw TUI this summer doing a pretty good job to keep their flying going with a lot of ACMI work, and swapping their own fleet around all over the place.

EZY and FR may well do 6 -8 cycles a day on shorter routes with an aircraft, and as discussed there are few late night returns for their fleet, although EZY does have more night flights.
Jet2 ? - not so sure of their schedules.
All of these 3 LCC airlines do have spare aircraft or can shift them around to cover AOG situations, but maybe not everyday during the summer peaks or on 'bad days'
Spare aircraft lying around were not a luxury with any of the holiday airlines I worked with and 12 hour+ delays were common, either due to ATC or Tech issues.

At BMA our DC-9's all returned to their bases at night (MME LPL GLA EDI EMA and BFS) after bringing in the last flight from LHR, having done around 5 round trips that day.
We did try during a few summers to do some night IT charters when the aircraft got back - off down to Rimini Pisa Ibiza Palma Alicante (short flights) BUT if there was fog or bad wx on the inbound back in, or a hold up say down in Palma, that would mean a delay to the first early morning departure down to London which we could not tolerate the risks to upset the businessmen.
So we didn't do that many. I guess that model applies today to FR and EZY too.

[LGS6753]

Court Line certainly did 4, but the routes were shorter then, like the nearer Med rather than today's medium hauls like Cyprus and Egypt

...and I distinctly remember four "waves" at Luton in 1970 - 0800, 1400, 2000, 0200 when the whole fleet (8 aircraft) would arrive and depart within a couple of hours. As Rog747 says, the sectors were short - GRO, PMI, IBZ, MAH, REU, RMI, GOA, ALC, and the aircraft were smaller (89/119 pax). Record turn-round in 1970 was IIRC 29 minutes, full load in, full load out.