Last Friday, my girlfriend flew home for the holidays. Her flight was non-stop from Midway to LaGuardia. Given that an airplane had skidded off the runway during a snowstorm at Midway that previous night, and that that same snowstorm was dumping oodles of white stuff all up and down the Eastern seaboard that day, it was perhaps not the best day to be flying.
What she and I found odd and annoying, though, was this: There were several flights on the same airline that were supposed to fly from MDW to LGA that day. She was supposed to be on the third-to-last one of the day. However, her flight ended up being the last one of the day to leave; in other words, there were two flights on the same airline whose scheduled departure times were well after her flight’s scheduled time, and which ended up leaving significantly before her flight.
My question is: why on Earth did this happen? I’ve always envisioned flight delays at the airport as being something like a line-up. If the people in the departure or arrival city decide that they need to throttle back the number of flights, they can do so, and flights will start having to wait extra time; but it should still be first-in, first-out, right? Is it the airline or the air traffic controllers who decide which plane gets to leave next, and what incentive would they have to allow flights to “jump the queue” like this?
I can answer this part in one word: Connections. Your GF and everyone on her flight will have probably already missed any further flight connections because of their delay. The people on the later flights have not. In order to minimize (a) the number of irritated people who missed their flight and (b) the hassle of having to rebook everyone on new flights and track their luggage down, etc., the airlines prefer to delay the original flight until it is ready while letting later flights take off as scheduled.
Plane A goes from Dulles to Midway to LaGuardia.
Plane B just goes back and forth from Midway to LaGuardia all day long.
Plane C goes from Atlanta to Midway to LaGuardia.
Sitting in Midway, you just see 3 flights going to LaGuardia. Plane A is delayed. Planes B and C show up on time. In addition to the connection issue that Peter mentioned, there’s also the issue that all of the planes may not be the same size. Trying to shuffle people around so that the ones who have been waiting the longest would go first would be an incredible logistical nightmare. It’s easiest just to make the people on plane A to wait until their plane shows up.
I think Peter is missing the big point. On-time ratings for airlines are tracked and reported. Let me give you an actual example:
There were two flights from San Diego to San Jose, leaving an hour apart–call em flight 1 and flight 2. I was scheduled to be on flight 1. The plane we were to take was late arriving. It hadn’t arrived when they started boarding flight 2. I went to the gate agent and said, “We are scheduled to leave an hour before those people. Why are they getting this plane instead of us? It doesn’t have a flight number stenciled on it! We’ve been waiting longer and we’re scheduled first, so we should get the first available plane.” (Yes, before you ask, the two flights were using the same type of plane with the same number and arrangement of seats)
The gate agent explained that if that plane had been assigned to flight 1, then flight 2 would have gone out a couple of hours later, when the first plane actually got to San Diego. That would have been listed as two late flights on the airline’s record. By doing what they did, it showed as one late flight and one on-time flight.
It’s really quite simple. The on-time rating is more important to the airlines than the passengers are.
I believe that the gate agent told you that but the gate agent isn’t calling the shots. I think Peter’s explanation makes more sense from a $$ standpoint to the airline. It’s not so much the convenience of the passengers but the effort (and therefore cost) to moved people and flights. I can imagine there is a huge amount of effort going on behind the scenes to swap planes around. Flight plans must be redrawn and re-filed, there is overhead involved in recordkeeping for using a different plane than the one scheduled, even if exactly the same type of plane. After all, the airlines have to track their hardware, and FAA may also need to know of such changes. This probably just scratches the surface, I’m not in the airline biz.
What swapping of planes? There are two flights scheduled to depart: flight 1 and flight 2. A plane arrives of appropriate type for either. You assign it to flight 1 instead of flight 2. Haven’t you ever been on a flight that was switched to a different airplane because of a mechanical problem? It takes very little time.
No flight plans need be redrawn. Same flight, different plane. One minor change. When I took my first training flight, they scheduled me in a Cessna 152, and then found out I was too big for it. They switched me to a Cessna 172 and we took off a few minutes later. San Jose, California. Big, busy airport. It took virtually no time or effort to change the physical airplane, even though it was a different type.
And explain to me how Peter’s explanation means more $$ for the airline. Having their on-time record further sullied will cost them future passengers. Either way, people will miss connections. Using my example, these were the last two flights of the day. I’m not sure if there were any outgoing connections to make in San Jose, but if there were, the three-hour delay guaranteed missed connections, where the two shorter delays might not have.
If I’m not mistaken, this is also the reason you have planes that leave the gate and then wind up sitting on the tarmac for two hours before take-off. If the plane has left the gate on schedule, it is considered an on-time departure, no matter how long it takes you to actually get up in the air.
All of this is further complicated by the schedule of the airplane later in the day – your plane may be scheduled to go somewhere else right away when it lands, or it may have a delay before flying again. Even more complex is the schedule of the crew. They are limited in the amount of hours they can work, and may or may not be able to service your flight, or their next flight because of the delay.
Any solution to a delay must take all these factors into account, plus provide for normal scheduling the next day. All this complexity has removed humans from the decision loop, for the most part. Exquisite computer programs calculate how to maintain an optimized schedule of airplanes, pilots, flight attendants, and flights themselves.
In your case, delaying flight A, the first flight, affects flight A, plus the next flight for that airplane, plus the next flight for that crew. That’s at least 2 flights, maybe as many as 5 or 6. If you delay flight A, B, and C, then you’ve multiplied your problems by that much more.