I am scheduled to fly into Chicago this Saturday afternoon. It looks like flights are being delayed today and tomorrow. I hope I will be good to go.
However, it got me thinking: say every flight on Friday is pushed back to Saturday. Does the airport do double duty or does my flight get pushed to Sunday? Then Sunday’s flights to Monday, etc.
How does an airport or an airline get back to regular schedule after a weather delay?
In a situation like this, flights are more likely to be cancelled than delayed. So, it’s not that Friday’s flights will be pushed back to Saturday; it’s that Friday’s flights will never go at all.
Then how does that work for Friday’s passengers? You had 158 on a plane bound for a Cayman Island vacation. All 158 are calling the ticket office asking when they can fly out.
Do they just fit them in where they can, schedule another flight, or screw 'em, it’s their problem?
If the airline cancelled the flight, then they still have to honor their commitment to get each passenger to their destination (they can’t just say “screw em”). They. however, usually leave it up to the customer to make new arrangements; they don’t usually just reschedule you.
mc
Depends on the airline policy, the class of ticket you bought, etc, etc.
This is why you have travel insurance, people.
I wonder the same thing. One experience I had was flying from Tokyo to Montreal via Detroit. When I arrived in Detroit, the DTW–>YUL departure gate was full of people whose flight the previous day had been canceled on account of heavy snow in Montreal. Since I had a ticket for that day I was seated, but I wonder what happened to all those others. When we arrived in Montreal, it took us 45 minutes taxiing behind a snowplow to actually get to the terminal.
Once I was traveling Seattle to Montreal via Chicago on American. When I arrived in Chicago, it turned out that the entire AA’s computer network had crashed and AA wasn’t going anywhere that night. They gave me a voucher to a hotel that was 45 miles from the airport, taxis at my expense, and booked me on a 6 AM flight, meaning leaving the hotel at 4. Since it was already 10PM, I decided it wasn’t worth and sat up all night. I wonder whether that 6 AM flight was regularly scheduled or just added. In any case, it must have been hell for AA to recover from since it was system-wide.
I understand that, but how does it work? I’ve made up all of these numbers, but say that ORD has a daily flight to Georgetown, Grand Cayman with a capacity of 100 people. There are typically 95 on a given flight.
Thursday and Friday’s flights are cancelled due to weather. There are 190 people in line at the ticket counter, sitting in the airport, calling from their hotels, or clicking on their apps to reschedule their flight (they already have hotels booked).
As there are only 5 vacant seats on the upcoming flights, by my napkin calculation, it would seem that it would take 38 days to handle all of the traffic unless the airline added additional flights. What do they do?
sometimes it does take along time to “get back on track.” The thing the airlines have working in their favor is that a significant portion of air travel is time sensitive. For many travelers, if their flight is canceled or delayed for a significant time, they cant just take the next available seat, they completely have to reschedule their trip, which may mean next week or next month or next year. There are also alternate routes available: if you were on a non stop to podunk, there may be ways to get you to Podunk thru ATL or MSP or DEN, etc so there are more options with those “5 available seats” than you might think.
mc
They fit them in when they can. This is why a big snowstorm hitting ORD (or other major hubs) is a logistical nightmare for the airlines. Generally speaking, they lack the resources (crews, planes) to add a significant number of additional flights to make up for the cancelled flights. And, as mikecurtis notes, some people make alternate plans, or cancel their trips.
It isn’t just the need to reschedule passengers. The more devastating effect is on the carefully choreographed movement of planes, pilots, and flight attendants. I’m sure that LSLGuy or one of the other commercial pilots can provide more detail.
Just two Mondays ago, I was flying from Winnipeg to Charlotte, via Minneapolis/St. Paul on Delta. I was originally scheduled to leave Winnipeg at 2 pm, and connect to a 5 pm flight to Charlotte. The day before the flight, Delta notified me that weather reports were showing a storm likely to hit MSP about the time my flight was scheduled to land there. By early the next morning, I was notified that the 2:00 flight was canceled. I was automatically re-scheduled for a flight the next day (Winnipeg to Toronto to Atlanta to CLT), but I managed on my own to book myself out of Winnipeg on the earlier 11:30 am flight.
That flight took off, but just 30 miles from MSP, we were turned around and sent to Fargo, ND. After some start-stop activity there, they officially put the flight on layover until the next morning. Meanwhile, Delta re-scheduled me out of MSP on a roughly 2 pm flight to CLT. The next morning, when I arrived at the Fargo airport, our flight was scheduled to leave at 6:45, but the two regularly scheduled Delta flights that morning to MSP were canceled. The plane for the first one had never arrived, and the plane for the second one wasn’t in MSP to make the flight to Fargo, yadda, yadda.
In the end, I made it home, but MSP was NOT a pretty sight that day. Nor was the Fargo airport (which has 5 gates and usually services small regional jets); there were two fairly large planes which had also landed there the night before, thoroughly over-whelming that airport.
Yes. And it is probably the more pressing concern to airlines. If “equipment” gets stranded at an airport then that effects all the other airports that were expecting to use that equipment.
Right now the airlines are preemptively cancelling some of their flights into both airports in Chicago even though the airports are still open. All in an effort, I believe, to make sure their equipment (and passengers who are “just passing thru”) isn’t stuck there when they do close the airports. We’ll see how that works out. . .
mc
This. There’s some flexibility in dealing with passengers, since for most of them there will be a selection of alternative routings that will get them to their destination, plus some of them will elect not to fly at all, since the delay has frustated the purpose of their trip. But what you can offer passengers crucially depends on where your planes, flight crew and cabin crew are, so that’s got to be your starting point.
They will reschedule your flight in most cases (there may be exceptions for some fare classes). I have even been re-scheduled onto other airlines and into first class. Airlines don’t just get to cancel the flight and keep your money.
As far as catching up, they’re not adding new flights, but the delayed flights, if they aren’t cancelled outright, do eventually take off. They system may have cascading delays, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that there is a net loss of seats or travel capacity.
When flights are cancelled, then you will see system impacts of several days before all customers are rescheduled. This is based on 20+ years of 50-100K miles flown per year. YMMV.
At the airport I used to work in, the taxi fleet based there was also contracted to take passengers to other airports for alternative flights, sometimes the whole plane’s worth was loaded onto coaches and taken to another airport.
I was just working at a coffee shop, but all the taxi drivers would hang around in the wee hours for a chat, so I got to hear all the stories. They were instructed to bring passports with them on shift, in case they had to drive customers to France (from the UK), though that was very rare.
Driving the length of the UK to get passengers on another flight (or just to their destination, as the airport ran flights within the UK) was pretty common though.
The time when it got really complicated is when the whole country had flights grounded due to weather, so that wasn’t an option, then every airport was trying to play catch up at the same time.
We had a scare returning home from St Martin a few weeks ago. Their once beautiful airport was destroyed by Irma. The “airport” now consists of several tents. There used to be flights coming and going all day long, now there’s a flight to the US.
Our flight home was delayed, then cancelled. It was a little bit scary. We were told they’d try to get us home the next day. One guy was considering taking an island hopper to Puerto Rico, then getting a flight from there to Miami. They had a little bar set up and allowed us to use our meal vouchers for booze. We made it home, but it was stressful.
There’s probably flights from NYC, Atlanta, Miami, etc. with similar empty capacity. A lot of those passengers will be rerouted through those airports.
I think we are saying the same thing. when I say the airlines don’t just reschedule you, what I mean is that they don’t just automatically do it. If you’re already at the airport you can go to the gate, if it’s still manned, and talk with the agents and they will search their computers for options and ask you what works best for you - even, as you mention, checking on other airlines and in other classes. But, they usually wait for you to make the first move. I have been in the situation where there entire plane was checked in and we were moments from boarding when the flight was cancelled. In that instance the gate crew did just start rebooking the seats on other flights and had the passengers queue up and get their new assignments, but there was wiggle room. they asked the passengers who were more flexible with their time constraints to allow the other passengers to queue up first so that they might be able to get on flights leaving sooner. But that’s in the case of one plane being cancelled. The OP is talking about when and entire airport is running behind.
The airlines almost never cascade delays. If a flight can leave on time it will. A delayed flight will try to be squeezed into the lineup but not at the expense of another flight just because it was originally scheduled before it.
mc