Originally Posted by
Dave Fitzgerald
Reliability? Remember, UAL decided to stop maintaining the 400's when they announced the retirements for 2018. Whenever that happens, the reliability plummets. Not the aircraft's fault. Cheap management decides what kind of reliability they want to pay for. Just hope it doesn't bit us in the form of an incident or accident.
Reliability is directly proportional to how much money you spend on future maintenance and parts, so drawing this conclusion is a false assumption and directly attributable to flt ops decisions on spending.
Nice rant but what's your point?
UAL is replacing expensive unreliable ASMs with cheaper reliable ASMs.
No doubt that if the company wanted to throw unlimited money at the fleet, they could keep it going. But, corporate boards are fickle like that, they want to know how management will spent (and then want them to spend as little as possible).
Every renew/replace fleet modernization cycle follows the same logic, UALs 747 fleet isn't any different.