European

 Holiday Charter Airline Operations

The tour operators arrange the holidays for the customer to fly from their nearest regional airport. The aircraft fly to different destinations on different days. The aircraft fly from all the home country regional airports and arrive at the resort airports more or less at the same time. The passengers can transfer in bulk to their hotels and apartments. This is normally by coach within half an hour of arriving at the resort airport. The departing passengers normally board very quickly  after the aircraft arrives. The turn round time is about one hour at the resort airport .

To offer a better price for customers, these flights normally operate outside of the main scheduled airline peak times. Because of heavy congestion over Europe these aircraft have to fly standard routes to and from  the European Regional airports and resort airports. ( NO Direct Routes.) These routes are published in Aerad Supplements.  These routes vary off peak and at weekends when the military gives up more airspace. They can be found on the Eurocontrol website under RAD routes. A link is provided below.

If you can imagine aircraft from all the European Countries going to Spain, Cyprus and Canary Islands you will soon see why these routes are needed. Also routes have to go round the war zones of Bosnia and the Middle East which can cause havoc with schedules. In addition  you have scheduled services also on these routes.

Due to no radar in the Atlantic Ocean a Special Procedure is flown this will also be described in its own article. 

The Air Traffic Control system of the the UK and  Europe, plus the routine of real  Airline Pilots, is also explained in more detail, in other items . You hopefully will now  get an in depth understanding of the system, and how it all comes together. When you fly you will now  have a good idea what happens in the real world. 

I am also available to answer your questions should you not understand it. 

The aircraft normally do two or three flights per day.  For Example it could start at 0630 at Manchester got to Tenerife  arrive back from  Tenerife in Manchester at 1700 and then Leave at 1900 for Cyprus then arrive back at 04 30 in the morning. Then depart again at 6 30 to Palma etc etc. You can now see that it does not take much for a delay to have a knock on effect. At some point during the week the aircraft may have to be repositioned to its maintenance base and another aircraft replacing it. Occasionally the outbound aircraft will return to another airfield and then back to resort and then back to the original base. This cuts costs on positioning flights and landing fees. The pilots being relieved on return to the other airport by a crew that may have been positioned by road or air taxi or put up in a hotel the previous day. They then return home by road etc.

Despite all the lovely holiday places the pilots and crews fly to they never see most of them as they are only there about an hour and prepare the aircraft for the return leg and fly back the same day. 

The longest the pilots fly from the UK in the same day, for a return journey is Luxor. Often pilots will stay  away from home for week travelling up from their main base to say to Glasgow. They will then live in a Glasgow hotel for a week, flying to a different resort each day. They return home at the end of the week. Pilots take it in turns doing this at different UK airports.

Similar arrangements exist for all the other European Countries when flying to the holiday resorts. It is a unique operation and varies dramatically from the scheduled airline. The scheduled airline pilot may do the odd night stop on short haul routes and spend most nights at home. They would do possibly two or three short trips per day.  The Charter Pilot may do only one long round trip in a day to perhaps Turkey Cyprus Greece or Canary Islands.

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