That's pretty myopic. You've been around long enough to know that the system is incredibly large, and that the "spare" might not come into play until several flights downstream or even several days downstream. It's not like the military where the spare was sitting on your flightline.. it might be in a totally different city..

Okay, I guess I should have also added that I have been told by Maintenance Control on numerous occasions that the DC-9 fleet is operating without any spares. Do you think they would know what they're talking about?

Also, don't forget that the DC-9 is a very small fleet that operates to a limited number of places. I think my observation with regards to spares is likely to be correct.

I think you mean 6 SCs/month. That was the limit when I was hired 23 years ago. It briefly went up to 8 and now it is back down to 6, so I think that people understood the ramifications of that deal. What changed was that we reduced reserve manning about 65% and therefore each reserve left had to do more short calls. It was a concession but not one that anyone was surprised by, but it was a concession.

My verbiage was not precise. They have spares to rotate to the line when the jets go in the hangar, which happens quite frequently. They have the same number of operational spares as the rest of the fleet. They frequently run out of operational spares as there are more maintenance issues. Last I saw, the average hours per day was around 4 while the 88's would get 8-9. That is the point I was trying to make but did not say clearly.

Okay. That makes more sense. Thanks for the clarification.

I agree with you on the maintenance issues. I've only been on the airplane since last April, and haven't done all that much flying. But my limited experience has been that the airplanes break frequently.

ya think???????

Sorry... I wasn't trying to be a smart ass... You left out that little gem about talking to MC about it.. I also had no clue that we are only getting 4 hours/day out of the a/c... yuck.

I'll hang up and listen again..

Alright, who opened the door for columbia to give us that post?? who did it?

I don't know if this has been stated yet, but I just heard that the DC-9 fleet willbe gone in 12-18 months.

There's an aircraft utilization report on the TOC site but you can only access it from a work computer. While the numbers change monthly, the last report I saw (December) reflected 26 DC-9-50's scheduled, 4 as operational spare, and 4 as maintenance. The report also has block hour utilization for the aircraft, and it was the lowest in the fleet. Part of that is stage length, but part is reliability.

The utilization has actually gone up as the DC-9-30/40 were parked.