FAQ - FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
CAPACITY CHANGE REPORT
2) DO THE SCHEDULES SHOWN HERE CHANGE AFTER YOU POST?
4) WHAT ABOUT CARRIERS THAT DON'T PUBLISH A SCHEDULE 9 MONTHS IN ADVANCE?
5) HOW ARE THE SEATS CALCULATED?
6) AMERICAN DOESN'T HAVE A PLANE WITH 10 SEATS?
7) THOSE FLIGHTS AREN'T DELTA, THEY ARE SKYWEST?
8) THE SEATS MAY HAVE CHANGED AS YOU SHOW, BUT THE DEPARTURES DIDNT CHANGE?
2) DO THE SCHEDULES SHOWN HERE CHANGE AFTER YOU POST?
To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often---Winston Churchill. This is data the carriers filed at the point in time it was captured. It's probably changed since then.
3) HOW DO I READ IT?
ABE-ZIH DEC 400>500[425] JAN 400>500[425]
ABE= Departure IATA code (Allentown in this case)
ZIH= Arrival IATA code (Ixtapa in this case)
DEC = Month (December in this case)
400 = Average Seats/Day Each Way over the month for sale as of last week
500 = Average Seats/Day Each Way over the month for sale as of this week
[425] = In brackets is the number of Average Seats/Day Each Way over the month that were scheduled one year earlier. So, it means that the listed airline changed the capacity between the two airports to add from 400 to 500 seats each way each day in December and January. It also means that there were 425 seats the prior year in each month. No other months were changed.
Process repeats for subsequent months with changes. I average two directions ([inbound + outbound] / 2).
4) WHAT ABOUT CARRIERS THAT DON'T PUBLISH A SCHEDULE 9 MONTHS IN ADVANCE?
Sometimes airlines do not load their schedules for the entire 330 day standard sales window. Southwest and many LCCs load their schedules for as little as 5 months into the future. When these flight are extended into a new sales month, it becomes a "schedule change". When a flight is loaded from 0 seats to X seats, where X was the same the prior year, the record will not be shown. For example, if Delta loaded ATL-EGE MAR 0>150(150), it would not be shown because this additional flight does not represent a real year-over-year addition. Similarly, if B6 extended their schedule a record like this ATL-BOS JUL 0>400(400) would not be shown. It will be shown if the flight frequency changed from the prior year. So B6 ATL-BOS JUL 0>300(400) would be shown.
5) HOW ARE THE SEATS CALCULATED?
This is SEATS/DAY over the course of a month, so remember it often will not be an aircraft size unless there is 1 daily flight. The seat count is approximate. I can't keep an accurate table of all the seating on airplanes by airline, so it will only be close. Things like Mint with unusual seating will probably be off by quite a bit in many cases. There are minimum filters that I may tweak. Right now it is 100 seats change or 20% versus a week ago. This is done to filter minor changes that occur in large numbers.
6) AMERICAN DOESN'T HAVE A PLANE WITH 10 SEATS?
Flights that do not operate every day of the month can create this effect. If an airline flies a 150 seat plane 6/days per week in a non-leap year February it would have 24 operation during the month equaling (24*150) 3600 seats, but per day it would only amount to 129 (3600/28). The seating capacities used are also only estimates based on the airplane type.
7) THOSE FLIGHTS AREN'T DELTA, THEY ARE SKYWEST?
This report only shows the marketing code. It is too complicated to show all the operators.
8) THE SEATS MAY HAVE CHANGED AS YOU SHOW, BUT THE DEPARTURES DIDNT CHANGE?
The SCHEDULE CHANGES REPORT is better suited to tracking departures. Equipment type changes may result in a route only appearing in one report the same week.
9) THIS LOOKS LIKE AN ERROR?
The carriers file the schedules. They do make mistakes. Most of the mistakes I have seen are either related to code shares not being marked as "duplicates" or carriers filing flights with invalid data such as equipment codes that are not standard or overlapping schedule periods that see the same flight number in two places at once. These cause flights to not appear. We also see situations where the data is capctured in the middle of an airline updating its schedule. For example, at 1013pm AA deletes its schedule to/from ORD for April to June and begins adding flights back in at a rate of a dozen every second, requiring several minutes to complete the update. If the data is captures at 1016pm some flights may not have been reloaded for sale yet.
10) ONGOING ERRORS?
When these types of recurring errors occur it is 99% of the time prior to my receiving the data. If you can identify a pattern (It’s only when its a Skywest operation as AA with flights on CR7), I can report it.
11) CURRENT MONTH CHANGES?
I don’t report any data for the current month and never have because the number of departures decreases based upon the number of days left in the current month which creates many problems. So when an airline cancels flights less than 31 days from the start of the flight it may never been shown and when the prior year numbers are displayed, they will also reflect what was for sale the prior year the month before the flights were supposed to operate.
12) CHARTERS?
Charters and non-scheduled flights may show up if the airline puts them in their filed schedule. Just because a flight is listed here doesn't mean you can buy tickets on it. In order for a flight to be "sellable" there must be a schedule filed, there must be prices filed, and there must be inventory marked open in the airline's revenue management system. Charter that are published in their public schedule typically do not have open inventory making them invisible to the public.