Winter Flight Cancellations and Getting All Those People Where They're Going

Factual Questions
1

Today because of snow, somewhere around 200 flights were cancelled out of Seattle’s airport… I’m wondering - how do all those people get where they’re going?

Just to get a general gist of things, let’s pretend they were all Boeing 737-700s that were 99% full due to the holiday travel season - that’s 149 passengers * 0.99 = 148 passengers per plane * 200 planes = 29,600 passengers who didn’t get where they’re going today.

It seems unlikely that even a big airport that handles around 99,000 passengers a day (average over 2021 passenger year) can somehow add 30% capacity to get those travelers handled over the next couple days… so how do people actually get where they’re going?

Go from other airports?
Choose other modes of transportation?
Add additional flights?
Choose not to complete their journey after all?

Is there anyplace that has studied this and gives a breakdown of how these people eventually get where they’re going?

2

Flights are more like 90% capacity typically. It used to be that people would be shifted to less popular airlines (because of cancellations and missed flights, I once flew a round trip of the legs each way on four different airlines even though it was booked through Continental) but for the most part that extra capacity no longer exists, nor do airlines have enough extra crews to add a bunch of flights even if they have surplus planes, so I suspect most of these people are shit out of luck as far as flying goes. The US Department of Transportation definitely tracks statistics on flight delays, cancellations, and rebookings but I don’t know if or how they would track alternative transportation with any fidelity other than looking at aggregate differences in bus, rail, and road traffic.

Stranger

3

A good percentage of displaced travelers will end up doing this. Obviously, people who are not from Seattle will need to get home. But people who are traveling for a relatively short trips often just give up on it, since they might not be able to start their first leg for a few days.

4

Yes. Saw a news item with interviews with a number of people (Western Canada0 stranded by bad weather of the cascade effect on scheduling. There were a number who simply would not go (“I’ve missed the last BA connecting flight to Scotland”, or “I have a $3,000 rental in Palm Springs that is non-refundable. Not going to make it.”) Some were able to get on other flights, or postpone the trip for day.

Many many years ago, once upon a time before COVID, we were flying from Calgary to New York. They announced the plane that first leg was overbooked and asked for volunteers. This was 6AM. I told the gate attendant my wife and I would take any later flight if they could still book us through to New York before midnight. (Hotel was prepaid). they couldn’t, so we flew our flight, arrived on time. But - that was an indication how already overbooked the whole system was, that with multiple options and multiple possible routings, there was no alternative seats available, and this was not a weather issue so all flights were sort of on time.

5

This is pretty much the whole story.

There are very few seats unsold every day, and far fewer than that unsold at holiday times. If 10% of flights through one city cancel on one day, it might take 3-4 days to get everyone onto a different flight. This unpleasant circle is squared by lots of people who are still at home simply cancelling their travel plans, and the folks who are trying to get home driving, railroading, bussing, or spending 1 to 3 days trying to get a seat.

The idea of running extra unplanned flights on e.g. Friday to make up for cancellations on Thu is pretty much out the window too. That takes airplanes and crews that simply don’t exist; all those assets were already expected to be working on Friday before the weather mess hit. And in fact due to the weather mess, a lot of those planes and people will not be in the expected places. Which means even more wasted time and motion getting everything repositioned back to where / when it’s supposed be.

There is a small exception here. Very often when a flight scheduled for late in the evening can’t go for weather, mechanical, or crew reasons they won’t cancel it. What they will do instead is delay it until tomorrow morning. The same jet & passengers will travel to the planned destination at e.g. 7am instead of e.g. 9pm the night prior. The airline will be burning their very finite supply of standby crews to work the flight, while the ones who were supposed to work last night sleep in a bit and fill in somewhere else that afternoon.

Why does the industry do this overnight delay stuff? Because DOT counts a flight that departs eventually as not being cancelled. Once a flight is more than 15 minutes late, it’s scored as “late”. There’s no difference in the DOT scores between 16 minutes late and 16 hours late. This way they avoid a recorded cancellation against their stats.

6

I don’t know how often this happens, but I was on a Denver to Newark flight once that was cancelled during a blizzard, and everyone on the plane was on it again the next day when they tried again - and finally made it. The was the early '90s.
We had been on the runway when it got cancelled, so I guess they decided it was easier just to take us all the next day rather than rebook us.

7

The airlines are proactive about sending pilots to hubs to be on standby. My wife’s niece is a pilot for American and she is being paid double time to sit in a hotel room at her hub while these storms rage. If there is a weather window, she can get to the airport quickly and launch.

8

Timely topic. I just got a call from my 18 y/o daughter in Vancouver. They just canceled her Dec23 flight (2 days before she is supposed to fly) and rebooked her on a Dec26 flight. To add a bit more to the story, the UBC residence is closing for Christmas and tossing all the kids out on the 23rd. Luckily her brother is in Vancouver as well and she will stay with him for a few days until she can come home, but most of the kids in residence will not be so lucky. I don’t know what they will do. It is a mess.

9

That’s good as far as it goes, but airlines are strapped for pilots, and even more for cabin crew (which they cannot fly without even if they have a pilot and copilot). I’m sure they’re trying to keep as much standby capability as they can, but when the industry has to cancel hundreds or thousands of flight in a couple of days playing catchup is the work of a week or more, even assuming a significant proportion of travelers just abort their plans.

Stranger

10

Just flew PHX to PHL today for family Xmas visits. Really glad we flew today, the rest of the week looks like a disaster waiting to happen. Even though it is a hub to hub flight on AA so one they really don’t want to cancel (a few years ago we were on the same route, our plane had mechanical problems so they canceled a different flight and gave us their plane.

I’ll probably be singing a different tune over the weekend when it is in the teens here and the 70s back in PHX…

11

Yeah, it’s unclear to me whether she is on standby to fly passengers or just to ferry aircraft.

12

I work more or less full-time as one of my carrier’s standby pilots. And have for most of my career. Rather than having a schedule of flights for the month, I have a schedule of days off and days on-call. During my on-call days if the phone rings, I drop whatever I’m doing, get dressed, and immediately leave for work for a few days.

We carry a lot of standby pilots (and FAs) as a fraction of the total crew force. But between the vagaries of who’s working dawn patrol shift and who’s working late night shift, and who’s available to fly for the next 5 days versus who’s available for just 1 or 2, the list of people who can replace any given crewmember’s work 1-for-1 can be surprisingly short.

The big thing is that once cancellations start, lots of crew and lots of airplanes are not where they need to be for their planned next activity & the activities after that. The 5-dimensional jigsaw puzzle of pilots, FAs, planes, gates, and passengers so carefully assembled by the planners 30-90 days ago is suddenly scattered all over the table. Anyone who’s made a real jigsaw puzzle knows how much bigger the array of loose pieces is versus the finished picture with all the empty space squeezed out.

So called “irregular operations” are like that unassembled jigsaw puzzle. HQ people and software are working as quickly as possible to snap at least some pieces together to get something moving more towards normalcy. But with vastly reduced crew- and aircraft- efficiency versus the carefully crafted “finished product” plan.

We rarely ferry airplanes as a recovery measure because once we can get a pilot & FA crew together, there’s no reason not to bring passengers along. But it’s not uncommon during recovery operations for us to have 10 or 20 crewmembers deadheading on a passenger flight. Those 2 or 3 or even 4 crews are doing nothing productive. They’re just getting to where they can begin to be productive. or getting to where they can get their legal rest before they can become productive the next day. Worse yet, those e.g. 15 crewfolks riding are displacing 15 disrupted paying passengers who could otherwise be riding in those seats.

We often joke that the real reason for the industry-wide crew shortage is that we’re all deadheading from where we are to where we should have already been.

In many ways our “irregular operations” are a parallel to the supply chain disruptions we’ve all become familiar with since COVID started. The difference is that our “supply chain” mess is happening in real time while you watch us flail. Unlike the supply chain mess for e.g. TP which happens in unseen factories and on unseen trucks days or weeks before you find the empty shelf at the store.

All the problems stem in effect from a management mentality that “just in time with just barely enough is sooo much cheaper to operate than something more robust.” Add in near-perfect price competition and widespread consumer preference for “cheaper, cheaper, CHEAPER!”, and there’s really no alternative to no-slack planning. Whether it’s TP or airline seats.

The result is maximally inexpensive but very, very brittle.

13

Fascinating - it sounds like the airlines have more ability to create additional flights than I thought they would! Is there anywhere that might have information on how much additional capacity an airline or airport might have that isn’t being used in regular operations (e.g. is there a way to know if in 2021, say, an airport added 5% more flights than usual after a big storm or something?

14

Where did you get the idea there’s standby capacity? The whole thing is running balls to the wall pretty much all day every day. And doubly so around holidays.

If we cancel 20 flights on a snowy Thursday someplace and somehow manage to fly 3 of those flights 18 hours later on Friday, that’s still a net deficit of 17 for the week.

We start each morning with some spare airplanes at each hub. With the plan that the normal amount of shit that goes wrong every day will use up all those spares by nightfall then we’ll cancel flights later into the night when there are no more remaining spares. Any extra shit, like a snowstorm, only makes the problem worse, not better.

We start each morning with some spare crews at each hub. With the plan that the normal amount of shit that goes wrong every day will use up those spares by nightfall then we’ll cancel flights later into the night when there are no more remaining spares. Any extra shit, like a snowstorm, only makes the problem worse, not better.

15

A few weeks ago I was heading home from Chicago and when the plane pulled back from the gate it started making this horrendous noise. It was obvious that there was something wrong, but it took a while before any announcement was made (during this time, one of the passengers near me speculated that there was a problem with the rubber bands which powered the engines, and I suggested that it was the hamsters). Finally we were told that one of the engines had broken down, and there was a crew working to determine whether it could be fixed. We sat there for nearly an hour before we were told that we had to get off the plane.

At first we were told that the flight had been cancelled and we were directed to go to the customer service are to make alternate arrangements. Then we were told that they had found another plane for us, which would be boarding at another gate in about half an hour. Since I am somewhat mobility challenged and the new gate was halfway across the terminal, I had to request (along with another passenger) for transportation there. After a little while, a transport car arrived and got us there in time to get on.

I don’t know whether this was a spare plane they had available, or whether they repurposed a plane that was already ready to go.

16

Thanks for the detailed explanation. The whole thing about price is obvious. I guess the other point is that another aircraft costs so much, and more crews on standby cost a decent amount, that it’s cheaper to inconvenience a bunch of passengers than to pay for an extra plane or have another inactive crew on standby for any once-a-season really bad weather situation. (And in those situations, one extra plane isn’t much of a difference.)

Who was it - Spirit Airlines? The CEO forwarded a letter to the PR guy, and accidentally back to the complaining passenger too - “We don’t owe this guy anything. He booked with us because we were $5 cheaper, and he’ll book with any other airline the moment they beat our price.”

17

That’s a great analogy, and something I’ve always wondered about:
just how do they get that whole jigsaw re-assembled so quickly?

Years ago, before the internet, I had to travel about 36 hours after a huge snowstorm had closed dozens of airports and cancelled thousands of flights. I assumed that my flights (to a hub and then connection flight, and then international) would be screwed up…
I called the phone number of the airline to ask if my flights were cancelled, and they laughed at me–they said the backlog was already cleared yesterday, and today everything was on schedule.

My mind was boggled, and still is.
How do you fix thousands of mis-matched jigsaw pieces so quickly?

I vaguely remember in math class the “traveling salesman” problem, where you had to calculate the most efficient route between several points.
It was too complicated for me—and with only a half dozen points,
With thousands of points, it seems way too complicated. Even if a computer does the theoretical calculations, you still have the physical problem of moving all the pieces in a reasonable amount of time–when each move takes several hours hours .
How does it actually work?

18

The general class of problems is known as NP-complete, and the Traveling Salesman problem is one example.

19

Technically speaking, the airlines have plenty of ability to create additional flights – but they won’t do it, because they would have to hire more people, etc.

20

I don’t know that that is correct. There is an international shortage of pilots. FAs are burned out and quitting because of Covid jerks (and jerks in general). Planes are at capacity. There is very very little slack or the ability to create slack in the system.