Does not change
What the Hours of the Field Are
The last of the three that never change, and the one most often assumed away. Charter is flexible about many things and completely inflexible about a field that is shut.
- What the answer is
- The hours the field at each end is available, and whether anything can be arranged outside them.
- How long it stays true
- Indefinitely. Published hours change occasionally and slowly, seasonally at some fields.
- What happens when it stops being true
- It does not. What changes on the day is whether the people who work those hours are there, which is an operational question for the operator.
Where this collides with the crew clock
A field that closes at ten in the evening and a crew whose duty runs out at nine make a very short window between them, and neither will move.
That is the practical value of putting a fixed answer and a perishable one side by side: on their own each looks manageable, and together they sometimes leave no trip at all. Finding that out at the request stage costs nothing.
Why it is assumed away so often
Because commercial airline schedules run late into the night at large fields, and people generalize from that. Smaller fields, which are exactly the fields charter uses, keep ordinary hours, and some of them are quiet after dark by local agreement.
What can sometimes be arranged, and by whom
Some fields will open outside their hours by prior arrangement, and there is usually a charge for it. That is between the operator and the field, and it is the operator who asks.
This desk does not arrange it, does not promise it and does not price it. What it does is establish early whether the question needs asking at all.
What this desk records
The hours as the caller understands them, and a note where a trip is close to a limit at either end, so the operators being asked see the constraint rather than discovering it.
Answers that do not change, one of three shelf lives in what a quote rests on