Besides my online Home Business and family life, I fix Aircraft for a
living. Today, with this fast-paced world and more people flying than
ever before, airlines are meeting these needs with faster and larger
aircraft. After all, the customer is always right.

Take my airline Jazz Air LP, which has destinations throughout Canada
and the United States, the majority of the fleet consisted of Turbo-
Prop Aircraft. That was 5 years ago. This workhorse called the
DeHavilland Dash-8 is a turbine powered twin engine airplane that
seats 37 people. A flight from Halifax, Nova Scotia to Gander, Newfoundland
in Canada would take about 2 hours.

Today the Dash-8 is being replaced by the sleek RJ or Regional Jet
which sits 50 people and can cover the same distance in 1 hour. Jazz
is a regional airline and owned by Canada's largest airline Air Canada.
Air Canada flies to destinations all over the world and is also replacing
it's older aircraft with fuel-efficient longer-range aircraft.

With the airlines, everything revolves around scheduling and they have
super computers and large staffs making sure it all runs smoothly.
Delays cost hundreds and thousands of dollars as the minutes tick
by. I guess we have all been there, where the aircraft is not moving
off the gate when it is supposed to and everybody is looking around
and some are starting to get a bit annoyed. Behind the scenes there
is a flurry of activity to correct what is causing the delay and every
second counts while the airline's money-crunchers are adding up
the lost revenue.

Why would a few minutes delay cost the airlines money? An aircraft
turbine engines suck up an enormous amount of fuel just sitting on
the ground. More fuel burnt while increasing speed after the plane
takes off in making up for lost time. Perhaps it is a maintenance delay
and there is money spent on parts, overtime, fuel for the maintenance
vehicles. The list goes on and on.

All day long, aircraft fill the skis shuttling people to one place or another.
In Chicago, one of the United States' busiest airports an aircraft is landing
or departing every 30 seconds. I came across that statistic 10 years ago,
just imagine the traffic today.

With all this fast-paced, racing to catch a flight, environment do you ever
think... when was the last time that aircraft was in the garage?



Being an Aircraft Engineer, I can answer that question and will let you know
the answer in my next post. Have a safe flight!