This fills me with so much rage.
This makes sense! Saves the airline from having to pay so many hotel vouchers, among other advantages.
Pro Publica article about ICE flights. It claims they are mostly done by contracted charter companies rather than military flights.
I’d like to reiterate something I said about this earlier: I was hired at a charter some years ago and quit during training when I learned they had this kind of ICE contract. I could not have lived with myself if I had participated in such a thing.
Wow, thank you. For real.
And also, thanks for that ProPublica linked piece. Fascinating. 
This.
The ETOPS regs require a lot of extra redundancy above what’s needed for normal overland or near-shore ops. If any of that extra redundancy isn’t available before takeoff, the flight doesn’t depart. Or at least not using that particular airplane. If it fails before you get to ETOPS airspace, you cannot legally continue. Gotta stay over land or near-shore.
Here’s a real world example that may or may not be what happened on this flight. …
For ETOPS, both engine-driven electrical generators must be working. So must the APU and its associated electrical generator.
APUs are much less reliable than engines and it is not uncommon to fly airplanes around the country with inoperative APUs. It just adds a bit of inconvenience on the ground, and would add a little spice to an engine or engine generator failure in the air. Such an airplane can fly around for over a week unrepaired as long as it is not doing ETOPS. But it cannot leave the gate on a planned ETOPS flight.
Now assume we have a jet with a good APU. The rules specify the APU must be tested in flight after a couple-few hours up at altitude to ensure it will start when thoroughly cold-soaked to -30C or whatever. Not on every flight, but on some.
So today is their turn to test it. They launch out of Dallas, all is OK, and a couple hours later they try the APU test. It doesn’t start. Per procedures they try a second time 15-20 minutes later. Still no start. Crap. They will not go to space Tokyo today.
It’s not an emergency. There’s nothing really “wrong” with the airplane. The book just says they’re insufficiently redundant to get hours away from suitable airport. While wandering over the USA they’re always minutes from a suitable airport. Such that the lack of an APU if more shit goes seriously wrong, would be an inconvenience, not the makings of a crisis.
So now they need to decide where to land. Which has a lot of factors, but minimizing passenger inconvenience is one of the biggest.
Returning the people to Dallas, from which they can catch the next Tokyo flight, or a special replacement flight to Tokyo gets them there faster and more conveniently and reliably than landing them in SEA or DEN. Probably gets the airplane fixed faster too.
But when did the next Delta flight to Tokyo from Seattle depart, or the next United flight from Denver? I would guess around the same time or later than the next American Airlines flight from Dallas. It may well have been a wash for the passengers – less time on the plane, but more time sitting around the airport or in a hotel room. And would American Airlines have any knowledge as to how many seats were available on other airline’s flights like they would for their own flights?
Do you suppose the putative Delta flight had enough empty seats to carry the American passengers in addition to their own? Good bet both planes were nearly full.
So now AA drops into SEA, Delta can take 10% of the AA passengers and what does AA tell the rest of them?
you may be surprised to know this, but the airlines talk to each other about passenger re-accommodation. They aren’t omniscient, but neither is this their first day in business. If something wasn’t done that seems blindingly obvious to an outsider, good bet the outsider is the one making the mistake.
Yeah, but doesn’t the same thing happen the way American did it? American Airlines flies a whole plane full of passengers to Dallas and needs to rebook them to Tokyo. They’ve got a flight to Tokyo the next day, but that’s probably nearly full already, so 10% of today’s passengers get on tomorrow’s Dallas-to-Tokyo flight.
Unless American fixes the current plane, or has another one ready to go on an unscheduled flight to Tokyo, they have the same capacity issue rebooking everyone that any other airline would have.
If the original flight had landed in Seattle, the passengers would have been on the ground four hours earlier, and could have started filling the empty trans-Pacific seats that much sooner.
The article does state that “the flight departed again the following day.” So I’m assuming they probably rebooked as many passengers as they could in Dallas, fixed the plane overnight, then flew an extra unscheduled flight to Tokyo for the rest of the passengers the next day. Sure, most of the passengers got to Tokyo a day late, but that was likely the least bad option. In Seattle they probably wouldn’t have been able to fix the plane as quickly, since AA doesn’t have their own mechanics and spare parts there, and it probably would have taken even longer to find other flights that could accommodate all the passengers.
If they truly did send an unscheduled flight to Tokyo the next day to accommodate the passengers, then I applaud them for it, and maybe that was the best result for everybody.
(Not exactly unscheduled; just very, very late.)
Right… it wasn’t exactly unscheduled, it was just delayed 24 hours or so.
I used to work those rescheduled flights a LOT.
I preferred the dawn patrol shift batting clean-up on whatever had gone wrong yesterday. Many days that meant staying home, not working, and still getting paid something. Yaay me.
Every morning we’d re-launch a few flights that never departed last night due to [whatever]. Officially it was still yesterday’s flight, just 12-15 hours later. In fact it was a new plane, a new crew, and often when we got to wherever we’d be deadheading home or doing something utterly different than what was supposed to have happened last night.
Why the rigmarole? DOT statistics. A cancellation is a big black mark and corporate travel departments care very deeply about that number being small. Under DOT stats, there’s no difference between being 15 minutes late and 15 days late. They are both just “late”.
So by launching what amounts to a misleadingly-labeled replacement flight the next day, we don’t cancel anything, and we take one black mark for “late”. Despite the fact it was common to end up with 20 people that next morning on what was originally going to be a full 180-passenger flight.
All the airlines do the same thing. The rules apply to everyone equally and the games are well-known.
Why doesn’t the DOT change their rules to eliminate this game-playing? Lack of awareness? Just plain slowness in changing the rules?
Also–isn’t this still kinda bad for the airline? The cost of a cancellation must be really substantial to justify flying a near-empty plane.
The DOT stats were mandated in detail by Congress back in IIRC the early 1980s. Back when Congress sorta functioned, but was not a paragon of wisdom. This was also v1 with the assumption they’d improve it over time.
Ask current Congress why they can’t alter the legislation to something more gaming-resistant and more consumer relevant.
It’s gone now, but shouldn’t that kind of thing have been under the umbrella of Chevron deference? I guess maybe if Congress had legislated the issue, then deference doesn’t apply.
Sometimes Congress gives very general guidance. Other times they micromanage. Generally the micromanagement occurs when two well-funded lobby groups square off to drive the legislation to their benefit. In this case Congress micromanaged and here we are.
Love the name and logo of this smaller airport. Charles M. Schulz–Sonoma County Airport - Wikipedia
And the information desk. 
Ha, yes! I hadn’t scrolled down that far. Thanks.
Couldn’t they just take a route that has more land under it in the Pacific such as the blue-spruce route in the Atlantic? It’s a long way back to DFW.