General Lee said:
Dashdriver,
I have always wondered what it was like to fly that BAe146. Do you enjoy it? Is there an FMS on that thing? I saw a few in Denver and I guess they are used for Aspen flights? Who flies those flights? Just curious. What kind of trips do you have on that plane?
Bye Bye--General Lee
General,
The 146 is a great little airplane to fly. They are getting a little old (the one I flew the other day has 52000+ cycles), but they are built well. It's a very stable machine and can do some pretty amazing things if we need it to.
AWAC aircraft have a dual GNS-XLS FMS installation and should have ACARS installed by early next year, or so they say. The rest of the cockpit is steam gauges. The DEN based crews fly the mountain stuff including Aspen year round, with added service during the ski season. With four engines, it's about the only jet that is capable of flying in and out of there. We have an FMS GPS approach that we built to serve ASE during non-visual conditions. The controllers hate its slow .70 cruise speed, but what's the hurry?
UAL has us currently serving the following cities with our fleet of 18 146's:
DEN, ATW, ORD, LNK, CID, MKE, MSN, SBN, IAD, RDU, ORF, MLI, DSM, ASE, ROC, SYR, ICT, and probably a few I missed.
The agreement with UAL allows us to fly 88 seat -200 models and 100 seat -300 models. They can reduce the fleet in 2005 to 10, but with the low CASM, I don't think they will.