Breath_of_Fresh_USAirways
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- Aug 27, 2005
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Words,
I don't think we'll see a whole renumbering of the fleet -- I believe there's a charge involved in "buying" a new registration number for an aircraft -- kind of like vanity license plates -- at least not for a while anyways and not until everyway to avoid this cost has been investigated (welcome to LCC!) But if we're gonna do it, let's do it when the aircraft are being repainted as that would be the most logical and efficient time to change the N numbers, since they'll have to be stripped and repainted anyways!
You're right, however, that most of the systems used by either US or HP wouldn't know the difference between 625 the A320 and 625 the A330 (don't know if those aircraft really exist, the numbers were chosen arbitrarily for illustration purposes.) And this is what I meant when I addressed Eric's original post -- tail number issues for customized Airbus IPC and other tech docs is not an issue. THIS is a real issue. (And don't tell me that we wouldn't be discussing it if he hadn't brought it up -- it's already being discussed by the people that register our new aircraft deliveries and such. They've realized it's not going to be a simple decision and has many ripple effects that have to be considered) Not only would the systems have to recognize a certain tail number, they would also have to have a way to enter and recogize fleet type. With a good IT dept (HP's is pretty good!) a "work-around" of some sort could be developed to do just this. But that would mean more work for everyone using that system -- having to enter not just tail number, but fleet type, too,when doing any transaction (geez, what did we do before computers?
) If LCC is going to spend any money at all addressing this situation I believe this is all the more reason to scrap Merlin and Sceptre and all those other antiquated systems and programs and get some real computing power in here that will fit our needs -- instead of trying to tweak these dinasaurs that were developed in the 70's! Now that I really start to think about it, can you imagine changing aircraft numbers in every system and every record and every place that number has ever existed among all the possible places -- mx, records, finance, engineering -- for as many as 400 or so aircraft at two different carriers? OMG -- that would be expensive and time-consuming and a waste of resources! Wow. Boxes and boxes of records and can you imagine the confusion that could ensue when tracing the history of an aircraft? So, how do we solve this issue? Re-register the smallest, youngest fleets that we're going to keep -- like the A330s? And what about the 767's? Their tail numbers are 6XX, too... What a headache! No, let's keep the N numbers we have and get a computer system or 2 that works for US!
Lots to think about. No wonder it's going to take so long to fully integrate.
I'm confident that we'll figure out the best way to resolve these issues -- they may seem large, but in the big picture we can work with them and still succeed. We just all have to want to, badly enough...
