V-Flyer

There's probably an obvious answer to this, but I'll ask anyway. Why do Virgin lease two aircraft from Air Atlanta for Manchester-Orlando when they would appear to have aircraft of a similar vintage in storage in Mojave?

I would assume that the bean counters had assed that it is cheaper to have a lease company supplying tyhe aircraft and crew than get one of your own aircraft from the desert, refit it to acceptable standard and then employ crew.
it might also be some sort of tax advantage ?

Didn't these aircraft original belong to VA, and then sold to Air Atlanta and then leased back to VA?

There are probably several reasons and only VS will know completely; but here are a couple anyway.

With sell and leaseback, you release the capital tied up in the aircraft. Against this you have to pay a lease but this may not be much more than the running costs plus deprecation if you still owned it.

For MAN-MCO, it gave then the flexibilty to cancel if the route had proven uneconomic without then having spare aircraft/crew sitting around.

With a wet lease, the leasee (VS) have no responsibilty etc for crew and all the add on costs etc. Air Atlanta have to provide crewing week in/week out and VS don't have to have extra staff to cover paid holidays/sickness etc.

With carefuil negotiation at the start of the lease contract, your costs are absolute and fixed whatever happens to costs in the future - this is Air Atlanta's risk

Lastly. since they don't ownthe aircraft, it does not give a lie to their claim of owning the youngest fleet of aircraft.

Hi mcb

These a/c (VBEE and VSSS) were originally operated by VS but after 9/11 it was decided to retire the Classic fleet to save money. It's not just that the a/c were less economical to operate; there's the added cost of dedicated crews, spares, etc which would be horrendously expensive for a one or two aircraft fleet. It was decided that as there was only a short-term requirement for extra capacity that it was more cost-effective to employ Air Atlanta. The agreement is planned to finish at the end of April 2005 but there are rumours it may be extended...

Cheers
Alan

airchabum

For the sake of my sanity (and comfort 'cos I'm travelling MAN/MCO in May) I do hope that those rumours are unfounded. The sooner we get a (currently) London-based 747 flying from MAN and ditch those antiquated crates from Air Atlanta the better. I posted a comment on here in Jun following a dreadful trip on those decrepit machines and only decided to go from MAN again in May 05 when I found out they were going to be ditched. Here's hoping:D

Crew flying from MAN to MCO are VS employees not Air Atlanta!!!

This includes Cabin and Flight deck crew!!

quote:Originally posted by declansmith
Crew flying from MAN to MCO are VS employees not Air Atlanta!!!

This includes Cabin and Flight deck crew!!

I thought the flight crew were Air Atlanta as discussed in This Topic 747-200 Flight Engineers.

Cheers

Phil

At first they were but now all crew are VS employees.

quote:Originally posted by declansmith
At first they were but now all crew are VS employees.

So what will happen to the VS flight engineers when the 742's leave the fleet will they loose there job's

Cheers

Phil