Yesterday I read that Indigo sees their business model threatened by the engines of their A320neo – because of the
longer start-up times of the PW1100G (dependent on how long the engine was out
after shutdown) the aircraft has to wait up to 2 min. longer with their engines
at idle before the aircraft can begin to roll and taxi for takeoff.
Now let’s
have a look if there is anything in this claim by looking at how Indigo actually
operates their aircraft:
According
to flightradar24 the 3rd A320neo (VT-ITA) flew on May 2nd
from Delhi to Nagpur. The aircraft landed perfectly on time at 3:40am (UTC). It
took off again 52 minutes later, 7 minutes later than scheduled but early enough
to arrive back in Delhi 4 min. ahead of the scheduled arrival at 5:56am.
The 2nd
leg of the day went to Bangalore with a scheduled departure at 7:30am (actual
departure time 7:55am). The aircraft arrived Bangalore 3 min. ahead of schedule
at 10:17am. Scheduled departure back to Delhi was at 11:15am, which was missed
by 9 min. Arrival in Delhi then was 5 min. ahead of schedule at 13:50am.
So we can
see no delays stemming from the start-up times. The 2 min. longer start-up time
is an the maximum, which only occurs when the engine was off for about 2.5 hours.
But turn-around times for the two legs was below one hour, so the extra
start-up time should be