Rego Requests - How long ahead?

[Brock Little]

Hello all,

How long into the future can you see what aircraft will be deployed on a certain flight? And how do you find out? Do you have access to a timetable with fleet positions, etc? I'm just curious, and I will be interested to know.

Replies will be appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

[Adam P.]

Get a job in an airline's ops department!

[Brock Little]

Will do! Do they hire 15 year-olds?

[Adam P.]

In all seriousness (now I'm not doing it anymore), any ops controller can tell you that there's not much point in asking for rego requests because things change so frequently when it comes to aeroplanes.
In the company I worked for there were 'standard' pairings that the maintenance planners would begin with, six or eight weeks in advance. They would use these to rotate aircraft through the network, in or out of maintenance as required. The initial plan would however only rarely reflect what actually happened on the day - once we in Ops got hold of it we'd make swaps as needed to avoid delays, swap out unservicable aeroplanes, action schedule changes or even organise on-the-day cancellations or diversions. On busy days regos would change multiple times right up to boarding time (and sometimes even after boarding... it sucks when the aeroplane won't start!!). This was with a single type of aircaft too... it gets even more complicated with multiple types in a fleet.

My point? You might find out a month in advance what rego is planned to operate your next flight, but I'd reckon there's a better than even chance that the aircraft that actually operates the service is a different one.

Adam

[Brock Little]

Interesting, thanks Adam!

[Skip Fulton]

Hi Brock, Adam is correct and it depends on the airline.

Airlines will work on a 7/14/28 publishing cycle (whichever one suits them best). The Maintenance Planning team determines the mandatory requirements (such as VH-ABC needs to be in this port on this date for maintenance, or is limited to XYZ ports) and then it is passed to Operations for the rest.

Generally, lines of flying are established well in advance and are part of the commercial schedule. A line of flying is a rotation that says on any given day, an aircraft might do MEL-SYD-MEL-BNE-MEL-ADL-MEL. So as an example, for an airline there might be 8 lines of flying starting out of Melbourne each day. 5 of them might be 737-800 lines and 3 of them might be 737-700 lines. Operations then have automated systems to look at all the requirements and assign actual tail numbers (registrations) to those lines of flying.

So 7/14/28 days out, the plan looks really good. Then real-life kicks in, and everything changes. Delays, maintenance issues, upgrading/downgrading aircraft sizes due to bookings, etc all force changes to the tail number assignments.

So as Adam says, a flight might be planned to be operated by VH-ABC, but the chances of that happening are slim. And the further out the plan is done, the more likely it will change.