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Showing posts with the label rostering

Norwegian's financial mess was building over a long time due to less than optimal cost control

There is things surfacing that indicate the financial expertise within Norwegian was more in getting financing and avoid paying leases rather than in cost control. It sems like different stakeholders have through the years done their besst to milk the company dry thus stopping it from building up profits for a rainy day fund. There are talk about pilots being well paid, sometimes double tariff for working on days off, which indicates that operations and crew control was not too well managed either.  These are growth pains that comes to light in many companies, including Ryanair with their well known roster screw up a couple of years ago. But Ryanair could afford it and have been busy ever since getting out of the union deals the problems led them into, finally mostly resolved by using the CoVid19 crisis to get low low and long term 5 year deals with their staff. In Norwegian on the other hand they who should keep an eye on the bottom line have instead concentrated on getting more finan

Can one cost effectively run early flights from a non base location

SAS have abandoned their bases in 2 airports in Norway. One of them serves the county's 3 largest city Trondheim and the other serves the oil capital of Norway Stavanger. Since Norwegians are early risers there remains question over if there still will be first wave flights out of these airports. Low costs don't run first wave out of non base locations ince then they would have to overnight crew in hotels. That is one of the reasons Ryanair have(had) over 80 bases around Europe. A low cost principle is every crew home in own bed at night. Now SAS is what is called a network airline that offers a certain amount of service. However as such it is not a very profitable one. The argument is that crew from other bases can overnight in hotels for a first wave departure but this rises the cost considerably. Not only the accommodation and food costs but also the crew on the last flight in can't really fly the first flight out because their rest period will be to short. And if th