What is the purpose of Friday’s QF81/QF84?

[exLXCXFF]

I was just interested in any thoughts as to why QF is currently running a weekly QF81/QF84 SYD - SIN run Friday’s in addition to QF1/2 and QF291/292.

I was on QF84 on Fridsy night and the flight probably had a 1/3 load only in Y. As Platinum, I got a lot of love from the crew and was also “officially” assigned a 4 seat row by the crew to lie down and sleep. Obviously, much appreciated and a great outcome for me.

But it seems like to be a lot of capacity into Australia on Friday night and again QF84 had a very light load. We left Changi early as everyone was on board early.

Thoughts?

 

[dajop]

Got to look at both directions. Looking at the final seat map on ExpertFlyer, looks like QF81 on Friday had about 89% load factor.

And even QF84 seems to be about 2/3 full - lots of full pairs by the window, but plenty of spare seats between the two aisles which can make it look deceptively empty (and J was full).

 

[wenglock.mok]

QF81 runs on Fridays to replace the AY A333 during its weekly one-day maintenance downtime in SIN. QF292 does not run on Thursday evening, which means there is a missing AY A333 in SYD on Friday mornings so it is replaced with QF81 operated by Qantas.

I presume QF84 would be run to bring the aircraft back to SYD.

 

[exLXCXFF]

Got to look at both directions. Looking at the final seat map on ExpertFlyer, looks like QF81 on Friday had about 89% load factor.

And even QF84 seems to be about 2/3 full - lots of full pairs by the window, but plenty of spare seats between the two aisles which can make it look deceptively empty (and J was full).

Agree - J was full (as it presumably always is). They seem to use the Melbourne aircraft from QF37 to run QF84 back while the QF81 aircraft does QF36 back to Melbourne.

So, looks like it‘s a timing problem with the service schedule in combination with the question on which leg do you reduce capacity on one day (Thu night back to SYD) and on which leg you increase it (Fr night back to SYD) as you don’t have the spare aircraft in SIN.

 

[tdimdad]

Hah, it seems we were near-row-neighbours. Another transferree to a row of 4 here...

I was thinking of the same question. However, QF2 and QF292 seemed to be full already several days earlier so perhaps this is their "2.5th" run to provide some surplus capacity on a busy day. Add @wenglock.mok's explanation and QF84 starts to make a lot of sense. It's also nice to have a late departure from SIN in case you want to have a dinner in town.

 

[exLXCXFF]

It's also nice to have a late departure from SIN in case you want to have a dinner in town.

Or deliberately spending almost 5 hours in the QF F Lounge in SIN which was why I booked myself + 1 on this flight originally. Getting two 4 seat rows assigned afterwards (me being Platinum and little Mr Silver) was an unexpected added bonus!