I have family and friends in the industry who pilot, work ground ops, maintenance, and are flight attendants. At an airline with over 300 departures per day things go wrong, crews time out, aircraft have issues on landing that somehow get ignored until morning, and many more examples then planes get swapped.
They generally have very few planes on standby because it’s like flying them empty, it’s an inefficient use of money. It turns into wack a mole quickly and one flight steals a plane, gate, or crew from another until none are left.
I've definitely swapped planes a few times after sitting in the plane for a while.
But yes, there's nothing stopping them from doing it for you flight. Or even from "permanently" doing it and undoing a day later.
They would have some good reasoning, because they don't make a fuss about exchanging equivalent planes, but if it's happening all the time, the planes must not be equivalent. But the actual reason is that somebody is always looking, and that somebody would get wary.
Last few flights the poor staff have come from one airport and returned to another country..
0: https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/travel/passenger-right...
As hearsay, I've had a friend on a flight where they made everyone deboard the plane because of an issue so they could get on a different plane. After waiting for that plane to arrive and boarding it, they decide there's an issue with that plane too. Then, after all of that hassle and a long delay, they claim the original plane has been fixed and re-boarded that plane.
Lots of things can happen
Baggage was loaded but the passenger isn't at the gate, have to unload all the baggage.
Plane that was supposed to be unloaded by now has a pallet that's jammed and needs to be hit with a sledge hammer for 20 minutes.
Hydraulics sprung a leak, maybe it's a nut that needs to be tightened maybe the whole thing needs to be taken out of service.
etc etc
For five flights, the airline would have a problem swapping out the planes because there's likely only one plane on hand at that airport at that time. For three, I think the population of the country would be quick to disapprove if the airline did it with any frequency. For two, the airline can't very well swap because it's that airline's biggest aircraft and the route is usually nearly full.
0 - the airline term of art for this.
First, when I was flying regularly, it was during the height of the original 737 Max scare, which also occurred within a few years of the CFM56 fan blade problems and the 737NG pickle fork fatigue cracking problem. It was a rough couple of years for the 737 family, yet I didn’t notice any serious uptick in equipment changes, and I was flying on airlines with a bunch of 737s in their fleets.
Second, the idea of some conspiracy involving falsely advertising which airframe an airline intends to use for a flight, which would involve submitting false flight plans and publishing false flight data, is patently absurd to anyone who has been exposed even as an end-user to the tech stack of the airlines, such as it is.
Between getting licensed employees to lie to the government and the airlines antiquated software, I don’t believe they could do what is being suggested, even if they wanted to.
https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/2022-11/AvWeek%20-%2...
Hopefully its rare but it can and does happen.
My best guess was that, given it was the last flight of the day, the airline decided they needed to move planes around differently for the next morning.
Or is it a model thing? Noise/pollution thing? Are you flying to some small island nation with special planes?
Yes, this is very likely about avoiding the max 8.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_MAX_groundings
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_MAX#Alaska_Airlines...
It's difficult to explain, you have to live here a while and experience it. Some things are tolerated, some things NOT. Occasionally flying other aircraft than planned? OK. Skewing the occasional swaps, deceptively using an aircraft type that the general public distrusts? NOT OK. That would turn niché distrust of an aircraft type into wide distrust of the airline.
This is disingenuous at best.
Assuming you're talking about flights where an aircraft operates an outbound flight from its base to airport XXX and then an inbound flight back "home" again.
If the airline decides to swap on outbound (base-XXX) flight, you'll get exactly that aircraft on the inbound (XXX-base) flight. It won't be completely last minute, because as soon as the outbound flight is swapped you know you'll be flying that aircraft on the inbound leg, but still, unless you change your flight to another, you'll be flying the swapped aircraft nevertheless. You just get a few more hours' notice.
FWIW, exactly this happened to my wife on Friday (Lufthansa transatlantic flight scheduled as A350, operated by an A340 due to disruption in Germany earlier last week due to freezing rain). For her that was the second late aircraft swap of 4 flights in the last 14 days.
If someone's objective is to reduce their likelihood of flying a particular airframe, these tools can probably help albeit at the possible cost of higher prices or less convenient schedules.
But there are no ironclad guarantees if someone feels that strongly.
Now if its specifically to avoid a certain type of Boeing 737 max when the airline already flies boeing, yeah thay might happen indeed.
The only cases of switching families is long haul, like Emirates replaced an Airbus a380 with a 777 once on a trip I took. Still caused massive issues because the boeing is smaller, so they don't like doing this.
They're complaining that they could buy a ticket out of one airport on an A320, that plane could get delayed, and the airline could swap in a 737 that was waiting for another route. Passengers on the other route would then get the Airbus that they hadn't specifically filtered for. That might happen on one in 50 or one in 100 flights.
According to https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/FSBR_B737_Rev_19_Dra...
> In January 2021, the FSB conducted an analysis of the changes introduced for the 737-8200. The analysis identified that the 737-8200 is functionally equivalent to the 737-8. The 737-8200 is incorporated into the MAX series aircraft group in paragraph 8.1 and in Appendix 2, Master Differences Requirements (MDR) Table.
Both the EASA and the FAA calls it 737-8200. Neither did it to remove the MAX moniker from it.
I booked a flight with them last night, and it’s scheduled to fly on one.
When a company may see that "oops we are gonna be paying $$$$ for the delays" they will have no fear to bring in another plane (not the one you booked).
The same applies of course for any planes that are damaged, etc.
I tried asking ChatGPT but couldn't give me an answer of the frequency "how often to air companies swap the planes" (I tried with various choices of words) and it couldn't give me a percentage or any other metric.
(Sort of. If you want to be sure to avoid regional jets on trans-oceanic flights you're pretty safe.)
I would say there is basically zero chance that you would be switched to a Boeing last minute with JetBlue.
I would guess something like 0% of assigned tail numbers (not plane model) remain the same a week before booking. Airlines that fly multiple models on the same route would be harder to reassign, but days before the flight if it hasn't sold out, it's still very possible they'll get moved around.
The safest way to not fly a particular model of plane is to not fly with airlines that open them.