Day time airliner parking Heathrow
 

Both Qantas and Cathay Pacific have aircraft that park-up all day before leaving late evening. Not all of their flights do this however, so is there a regular pattern as to which arriving flights layover/park-up and which turnaround in the usual 3 or 4 hours? You can't rely in flight numbers alone as they could switch aircraft between obvious flight number pairings.

I ask this because I'm always seeing a Qantas A380 and Cathay B747 parked up between T4 and T5, but never get to see which aircraft they are. The movement sites don't always make it easy to work out which ones they are.

Any information would be of interest.

Thanks.

Yes, the 251 & 255 arrive early morning one leaves midday on the 252 the other early evening as the 254, or something like that. One used to go the the BMI hangar for checks, but not any more.

Thanks. Does the incoming 251 aircraft always return as the 252, and the incoming 255 return as the 254 then, or do they sometimes switch over?

There are four daily Cathay rotations and the normal turnrounds are:

CX251 -> CX250
CX255 -> CX252
CX253 -> CX254
CX257 -> CX256

There are the odd occasions where the inbound aircraft ends up being deployed onto a different outbound but seems fairly rare for Cathay.

Very helpful BAAdboy. Do you have the same information for the Qantas flights by any chance?

Qantas also have four rotations, two operated by A380 and two by B744. This results in a sharing of the available aircraft on the ground fairly equally between the two possible departures. So:

A380
QF009 --> QF010 or QF032
QF031 --> QF010 or QF032

B744
QF001 --> QF002 or QF030
QF029 --> QF002 or QF030

From the start of the Summer schedule, flights drop to two rotations daily, both by A380:

QF001 --> QF002
QF009 --> QF010

Thanks for that Qantas info. Shame about them dropping 2 flights though.

Probably something to do with it being winter in the southern hemisphere?

I thought it was a result of QFBA route rationalisation, possibly induced by customers from outside the M25 transferring their business to one-stop flights with various middle-eastern carriers, so avoiding the extra stop in Heathrow.

Have BA acquired the slots that QF are not using, or have they gone elsewhere?