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Comment by hodgesrm | Hacker News Reader

Southwest runs 3 to 4K commercial flights per day, which is about 1 in 7 commercial flights overall in the US. They depend on aircraft doing many short hops over the course of a single day: 7 or 8 is not uncommon. When things go bad it tends to disrupt the system very badly.

These numbers come from the US DOT ontime database. You can access the data in ClickHouse at https://github.demo.trial.altinity.cloud:8443 (user=demo, password=demo). This is a public instance running on Altinity.Cloud.

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>You can access the data in ClickHouse at https://github.demo.trial.altinity.cloud:8443 (user=demo, password=demo). This is a public instance running on Altinity.Cloud.

All I get is a white screen with the word "Ok"

My apologies. Here is the correct URL. It's the ClickHouse web UI.

https://github.demo.trial.altinity.cloud:8443/play?user=demo

For instructions on use, check out the following blog article.

https://altinity.com/blog/connecting-to-altinity-cloud-with-...

This seems like a strategy designed to kill airframes via sheer number of pressurization cycles?

Nope, it's how short-haul single-aisle aircraft are operated. They make money only when operating a flight, and the more you can squeeze in a day, the more money it will make.

That's why their life in years is usually significantly lower than medium/long-haul multi-aisle aircraft, which often get converted to freighters after retirement, since the main thing that matters is number of pressurisation cycles ( and fuel efficiency, but it's whole different story).

> This seems like a strategy designed to kill airframes via sheer number of pressurization cycles?

That's what planes are for - to use them. They are not museum pieces to be preserved.

It certainly wears them out. Hawiian Air has the highest number of pressurization cycles of any US commercial airline (at least as far as I can tell--ontime data shows up to 18). So far they seem to have managed it without issues.

Another airline in the region, Aloha Air, did suffer an inflight fatality in 1988 when the fuselage ruptured. The cause was apparently poor maintenance. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aloha_Airlines_Flight_243

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