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by hueving
3605 days ago
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As a passenger on the west coast flying to another west coast city, I give no shits about the number of concourses in ATL. LAX still has electricity but delta's poor infrastructure planning has left a single point of failure in the deep south affecting flights everywhere in the world. |
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The "all over the world" bit is why there's a single point of failure.
A while back there was a story that made the rounds of aviation geeks, about Delta flying an empty 747 to Korea. That was to replace a 747 which had been badly damaged by hail, to the point that it would be unable to operate its scheduled return flight to the US.
Do you want to guess how many people, parts and places were involved in the "simple" task of dealing with this problem?
At first, the replacement 747 is in storage in a "boneyard" facility in Arizona, due to having been recently retired. So first it has to be pulled from the storage facility, put through basic airworthiness checks and fueled up, and then a flight crew has to be present to fly it to a Delta hub where it can be readied for a trans-Pacific flight.
The hub in question turned out to be Minneapolis. There, the plane has to undergo more work to get it ready for a long flight, and now multiple flight crews have to be present, since they need to rotate in and out over the duration of the flight (that's how you do long flights). Oh, and Minneapolis isn't normally a 747 base; it only gets them during peak travel seasons and on the occasional charter. So crews probably have to be brought in, stores and maintenance setups need to be brought online, etc.
Then the plane can -- finally -- fly out to replace its damaged counterpart, pick up any stranded passengers and bring them to the US. Which will mean flying into yet another hub, since the flight doesn't go back to Minneapolis.
Meanwhile the damaged plane is still sitting there in Korea, and needs to be repaired on-site to get it into minimum airworthy condition to fly home (empty of passengers). It's going to need parts, maintenance crew, flight crews, etc. just like the replacement plane did.
And the deeper you dig the more stuff you'll find like this. Running an airline with global, or even national-across-the-US, service is not something you can decentralize to avoid problems at one operations center. The amount of coordination just of people, parts and planes across widely disparate locations requires centralized operational control instead of devolved regional centers with high autonomy.