More of transportation question than a strictly sports question so I am placing it here.
You often hear tales of individuals flying from one destination to another delayed a day or two and having to stay over because of bad weather, but I have never heard of this happening with athletic teams where a national game date is cancelled due to bad weather having cancelled the team’s flight.
Why?
Because they charter flights, go to whatever closest airport is open, and take a bus to where they need to go.
The 1970 Marshall University Thundering Herd football team may disagree with the premise of the OP.
Of course airplanes carrying major sports teams get delayed. Sometimes they even crash. Perhaps the most famous example is Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571.
You beat me to the punch, psychonaut!
“Alive,” by Piers Paul Read describes just that.
*Of the 45 people who embarked on the flight, only 16 survived, while resorting to cannibalism in order to survive. *
I suspect the Torino and Manchester united air crashes are better known, worldwide. Or rather, those 2 crashes are famous because of the identities of the victims. The victims of the Uruguay crash are only famous because of the crash and its aftermath.
A detail from this article sticks out:
Who makes the primary decision to fly? Are the commercial carriers more conservative in their weather policy than the charters? (I don’t know that this was the case, for all I know the commercial flight was not to the same airport.)
Former airline type here. The vast majority of weather problems ordinary travelers encounter are due to the hub & spoke system most airlines use.
Simplifying a bit … Assume 50 airplanes are supposed to arrive at the hub between 9 & 10 AM. They then swap passengers and depart for wherever. Then the same airplanes return to the hub between, say, 3 and 4 pm, swap passengers again & depart for wherever. The airplanes spend the night wherever & the cycle repeats tomorrow.
Now what really happens. Each airplane coming in is really 4 things. It’s a bunch of passengers, an airplane, a pair of pilots, and a set of flight attendants. Each of those 4 things have different outgoing destinations. Just like most passengers change planes at the hub, so do most of the pilots and most of the F/As. The two pilots stick together, as do the gaggle of F/As, but often the pilots and F/A go to different outbound flights.
So one screwed up inbound produces three screwed up outbound flights for the airline, plus screwed up passengers on however many connectors there were; potentially all 50 outbounds, but more typically, 15-ish.
Now consider that all the planes are nearly full. If a single late inbound causes a planeful of people to miss their various outbounds, it’s a good bet the next flights to those places will be able to accomodate some, but not all of the excess. Which in turn creates more people that don’t fit in the next wave of outbounds. It all piles up at the end of the day when the last plane to wherever leaves full & 50 people are still standing at the gate wondering what to do next.
So we can see that the design of hub & spoke amplifies the routine small irreglarities of daily ops into larger problems. the only way the problem gets cleaned up is to have planned to have a bunch of empty seats on the last flights out, and have spare airplanes and crews of all kinds standing by to fill in for the losses during the day.
Now let’s add real weather, where of the 50 airplanes that were supposed to arrive in the AM bank, the airport can only get 25 of them to land in the available time. The rest trickle in over the next couple of hours.
The good news is only half the passengers arrived, so there are only half as many to handle. But you also only have only half the planes, pilots & F/As to take them whereever. Given the 3-way mixing, you will only have 2 of 50 planned outbound flights that will have the planned airplane, pilots, & F/As, ready to go on time. And you’ll only have 1/2 the passengers those 2 flights expected.
So now you’ve got a random assortment of airplanes, pilots, F/As, and passengers equal to about 45% of your original planned effort all milling around the airplort while HQ tries to come up with a spur-of-the-moment plan to recover.
The other 50% of all 4 asset classes will trickle in over the next couple hours.
You can see how this snow-balls. The usual full-scale disaster scenario that makes headlines is weather going from poor to awful around sunset. The airport has been slowly filling with people missing their flights all day. So a couple thousand happy folks are waiting their turn to get out of town. Now we bring one last wave of 50 airplanes x 150 people = 4500 folks into the hub. And the weather goes totally to shit & we get 5 airplanes out the rest of the night. Meanwhile, flight crews are timing out & cannot legally fly another flight. Also, the shift change for the ground workers didn’t go well since 1/3rd of the oncoming shift is trapped at home or stuck on the roads.
That’s a day in the life of running an airline hub. We get through a lot of Maalox.
Now, here’s how a sports charter works …
The airplane is pulled from the ordinary hub schedule the night before, even for a charter not leaving until dinner time. A fresh crew is set up who’ll be coming from home, not off some other flight. The crew and fully-catered airplane will leave the hub to go to the pickup city to arrive 2+ hours before the team will be ready to leave. Dedicated ground people will meet the plane. It will be immediately refueled and everybody will sit around for the two hours until the team shows up. All are ready at a moment’s notice to go if the game ends early, or willing to sit for 3 more hours if the game runs long.
Now the team gets to the jet & it’s time to leave. Crap weather generally doesn’t impede deaprtures nearly as much as arrivals. But occasionally the departure does get delayed an hour for snow plowing or a lineup for takeoff.
If there is crap weather at the arrival airport, we have several options. One is to use a different airport. Airliners can go into secondary reliever airports on charters even though they can’t in regular service. That can completely avoid a major airport which is overwhelmed with the aftermath of a weather problem.
If the charter has to use the major airport the other trick is called slot-swap. When the weather goes bad, the airport’s ability to land airplanes goes down. Say from 100 per hour to 40 per hour or 20 per hour. You can’t squeeze 10 lbs of airplanes into a 4 or 2 pound airport.
In this circumstance, each airline is allocated its “fair” share of the reduced number of slots. How they use them is up to the airline. So some flight from X to the hub is cancelled, or held up another hour, to free a slot at the right time to let the team arrive.
And once they land, they don’t go to the clogged terminal. They go to a separate place where a dedicated ground crew takes care of offloading. A crew which has been sitting there for hours if necessary.
As you can see, they operate in a totally different “airline” than you do.
And if you want to pay about $8,000 per seat for a flight from Chicago to Phoenix, you too can have that level of service.
All that said, if the weather at destination is so awful and so widespread that we just can’t cope with any alternate plan, then they stay in the departure city until tomorrow, and we try again first thing in the AM. Very rare, but it does happen. If we get them to the destination city by noon-ish they’re usually Ok for a late afternoon / evening game. Which most are.
And all the flights that airplane was supposed to make that next day are covered by a spare airplane, or are cancelled.
It happened to the St. Louis Blues a couple of times last season. The only time it gets anything more than a mention is when the flight is delayed so badly that a team misses it’s next game. That almost never happens, because the charters are scheduled to leave shortly after the game and gets to its next city hours before game time.
Air Canada actually has a fleet of 5 dedicated A320 charter aircraft, which, among other customers, serve all 6 Canadian NHL teams, some American ones, the Toronto Raptors, and a bunch of rock stars and corporations. The aircraft fly under the name Air Canada Jetz, are identified as such in their livery, and are fully outfitted with business class seating. They come with a dedicated crew and an on-board certified mechanic in the event of any last minute issues.
In the case of the Montreal Canadiens, the team/Jetz actually flies in and out of the St. Hubert Airport on the south shore, to avoid the chaos and traffic of the Dorval (Trudeau) airport.
Very comprehensive answer - thanks!
Almost all sports teams make arrangements that both makes this as unlikely as possible and maximizes the amount of rest for the players. I believe the rule in the NHL is that teams must be in town a minimum number of hours prior to a game, but occasionally you’ll hear the announcers say something like “Such-and-such team arrived at 3 am last night,” or whatever.
I can add two related NHL stories. First, the Columbus Blue Jackets spent the night in the Columbus airport at one point last season. They arrived late after a game in Canada, and problems with customs computers and staffing delayed their clearance through customs until sometime after 5:00 in the morning. Even professional athletes do have to sit around the airport just waiting.
A couple of years ago, a snow storm hit the Columbus area just before evening rush hour. Snow was falling heavily and quickly, and plows could not keep up. A NHL game had to be delayed for over an hour, the visiting team was stuck on the highway in their bus from their hotel. Not an airport issue, but they still got caught in the same mess everybody has to deal with.
These things happen all the time, they just don’t make major news. If the game the team is headed to is that big, they will usually travel days ahead of time. The Super Bowl teams are in the host city a week early. Any travel delays won’t make an impact on the game.
As they say on the intrawebs these days, mad props 
The Ravens played San Diego today in San Diego. They flew out Saturday AM.
So even if they were delayed a couple of hours, so what? It isn’t going to be newsworthy.
OSU charter flights generally land at the Stillwater airport that’s just a few miles out of town - the university flight school is the main operator out of there it seems, but the runway was upgraded semi-recently to be able to handle jets of up to 737 size or similar so that you can stick the entire football team on one, or the entire basketball team, pep band, and cheer squad for tourney time. A commercial flight would probably have been into OKC or Tulsa, which are 1 - 1.5 hours away from home for somebody living in town.
Charter run by the scheduled airlines use the same decision-making processes and standards for charters as they do for regular flights. The regulatory environment is looser, so corners could be cut, but they aren’t. The risk / reward isn’t there.
Now there are dedicated charter companies, both for airliner-sized airplanes and for executive-sized jets. And these folks operate in that looser environment all the time. Still, it’s what they’re used to, and if they’re any kind of quality operation, they use their normal processes on every flight.
Ref the post just above, the one thing airline sports charters do do which is a little out of the ordinary is use secondary airports. For example, running large airplanes into Topeka, which has (last time I checked) no regularly scheduled air service bigger than a 19-seater.
The airport hosts (or hosted) a USAF Air National Guard KC-135 tanker unit, so the airfield itself was plenty big & capable enough. It was just terminal facilities and ground equipment like tugs which were less than typical for airline ops.
