When the pilot enters an aircraft that has recently flown in, and is ready for its next flight, what is usually the state of the flight deck? I am assuming it won't be a 'cold and dark' cockpit, and all power will be up and running. Will air conditioning be running as well if the aircraft is in a hot climate?Regards,Awais M.

When the pilot enters an aircraft that has recently flown in, and is ready for its next flight, what is usually the state of the flight deck? I am assuming it won't be a 'cold and dark' cockpit, and all power will be up and running. Will air conditioning be running as well if the aircraft is in a hot climate?Regards,Awais M.

Speaking from experience, but not from a Flight Crew's perspective, I can tell you it depends on a few factors. If the turn time is pretty tight, the inbound and outbound flight crew tend to overlap each other, therefore the cocpit will be powered although typically not by APU, but by ground power since the airlines are pretty strict on APU usage and fuel consumption. If the turn time is a bit longer and no flight crew overlap (and/or no maintenance actions need to be taken to clear MELs), typically the cocpit is 'cold & dark' and locked due to security reasons. In fact the whole aircraft would be sealed and sometimes isolated from the jetbridge. Hope that helps a bit.

An engineer will often get to the plane first before any of the flight crew and power up the aircraft, set things up, because loading begins before the flight crew gets there. It can take a long time to load up a plane as big as a 777 with cargo, the food and drink for the flight, so when the flight crew finally does show up, they will find ground power already established, thus the nav lights on, acars probably established connection, and the fuel system usually gets set up too. It will be up to the flight crew to initialize everything avionic, including tests and align IRS etc. but I am sure a lot of this stuff varies from airline to airline