Compensation for TUI ‘re-scheduled’ return flight one week earlier?

PP1984

epm-84 said:

So given the length of flights between the UK and the Canaries are too short to be a full day's work but a return working will be a full day's work for the crew, we can be 100% certain that a Manchester*-Tenerife flight will be operated by the same crew and plane as the return Tenerife-Manchester* flight.  The crew will then have to finish on arrival back in Manchester because of the number of hours they've worked and given TUI don't do any short domestic flights and another flight to Europe would mean they'd worked too many hours.

I work as crew for a UK airline and I'm afraid your assumption here isn't quite 100%.   It's a bit of thread creep, but just wanted to point this out.

As an example, just last week I flew to the Canaries and returned back to another UK airport, with a subsequent taxi ride back to home base.  The ground transportation at the end of the day doesn't count towards our hour limitations, so it can end up being a very long day if returning to Scotland and having to taxi back to Birmingham, for example.  In these situations the other crew and plane would return to Birmingham and then taxi up to Scotland.    

Then there are the "tail swaps" down route, where the crews swap aircraft at destination.  So the return flight would be the same crew, but a different plane.

In most cases the aim is to shift the plane to another base at the end of the day, without having to do a costly empty domestic flight.   Usually to get them into bases with more maintenance support, or moving planes to meet demand e.g. Scotland having different half-term dates.   In some cases it could end up being a different country.

I don't work for TUI but I know that their short haul crews do a lot of ground positioning between airports, more so than other operators.

epm-84

PP1984 said:

epm-84 said:

So given the length of flights between the UK and the Canaries are too short to be a full day's work but a return working will be a full day's work for the crew, we can be 100% certain that a Manchester*-Tenerife flight will be operated by the same crew and plane as the return Tenerife-Manchester* flight.  The crew will then have to finish on arrival back in Manchester because of the number of hours they've worked and given TUI don't do any short domestic flights and another flight to Europe would mean they'd worked too many hours.

I work as crew for a UK airline and I'm afraid your assumption here isn't quite 100%.   It's a bit of thread creep, but just wanted to point this out.

OK I was probably presuming my experience of flying was always the case, when it isn't always the case and was getting a bit frustrated with the other poster not saying what they actually meant.  Their eventual argument seemed to suggest that it was possible for something happening in somewhere like Germany to affect UK to Canaries flights and I noticed TUI UK-Canaries flights are operated by a different subsidy of TUI to flights to the Canaries from other EU countries

bradders1983

Its going to be highly unlikely a Canaries-UK leg of a TUI flight is going to be operated by a non-UK based crew, at least everyone can agree on that surely.

In any case this is, in all likelihood, all utterly irrelevant to the OPs problem.