One of the most nightmarish travel experiences that a regular person can go through is a flight cancellation due to weather. Often, these flights are delayed for hours before getting canceled, then suddenly, more than 100 passengers find themselves in need of a new way home or a place to stay for the night. These experiences can feel like a slap to the face, especially if the flight is canceled long after the weather won’t be a problem anymore. But why is that? Why will some flights continue to their destinations after a weather event, and why will others get canceled? Much of it comes down to the one thing we can never get back: Time.
Yesterday was supposed to be a relatively easy day. Operation Frodo came to a spectacular conclusion, and I got to see 16 dogs go on to start the next chapters of their lives. Then, I got to have Laotian food for the first time. The perfect finish for this life-changing event was to be followed up with what was supposed to be a simple flight back home.
Unfortunately, trouble brewed in the skies over Illinois, and for more than the 300th time this year, a strong storm struck my home state. Tornadoes blasted their way through Streator and Dwight, while there were reports of another tornado tearing through Merrillville, Indiana. Much of the state was under several Tornado Watches, and the radar was lit up in red with heavy precipitation and lightning.
This is awful flying weather, and if you’re unlucky enough to have a destination in the path of a storm system like this, the flight is very likely to be delayed or canceled. If it’s already in the sky, expect to be diverted. Thankfully, airlines can get planes on the ground again once the weather clears and airports reopen, but awful weather can also cause a cascading effect that leaves passengers stranded, sometimes long after the bad weather has moved on.
Time Is Money
Let’s start with why airlines are obsessed with keeping as many planes flying as possible.
Generally, an airplane does not make the airline money when it’s on the ground. Ideally, the more people that an airplane can carry in one day, the more money the airline can make. Every second spent on the ground refueling the aircraft, draining its tanks, deplaning passengers, and performing maintenance costs the airline money that it cannot make back until the plane takes off again.
This is why airlines design their strategies around having the shortest possible turnaround times, with some airlines being more aggressive than others at it. Technically, with the way that airline economics work today, you could also say that airlines are just gigantic rewards programs that happen to fly planes. Airline loyalty programs and co-branded credit cards often generate more profit than your ticket does.
Duty Time
Another part of the equation is crews. Those aircraft can’t fly and can’t make the airline money if there are no crews to fly them. However, an airline can’t just force pilots to fly planes all day, as the federal government is quite particular about duty hours. From the Code of Federal Regulations:
§ 91.1059 Flight time limitations and rest requirements: One or two pilot crews.
(a) No program manager may assign any flight crewmember, and no flight crewmember may accept an assignment, for flight time as a member of a one- or two-pilot crew if that crewmember’s total flight time in all commercial flying will exceed—
(1) 500 hours in any calendar quarter;
(2) 800 hours in any two consecutive calendar quarters;
(3) 1,400 hours in any calendar year.
(b) Except as provided in paragraph (c) of this section, during any 24 consecutive hours the total flight time of the assigned flight, when added to any commercial flying by that flight crewmember, may not exceed—
(1) 8 hours for a flight crew consisting of one pilot; or
(2) 10 hours for a flight crew consisting of two pilots qualified under this subpart for the operation being conducted.
The government also requires a bare minimum of 10 hours of rest before a pilot can fly a commercial airliner. Then there’s duty time, or the total time that pilots are allowed to work in a single day. Pilots aren’t just flying the plane, but they have to inspect the aircraft, run pre-flight checks, handle layovers, and be on reserve. Total duty time is limited to 14 hours.
If a crew needs to fly a nine-hour flight, for example, they will likely start their duty time two hours before that flight to prepare for it. That’s 11 hours. That gives this hypothetical flight crew only a three-hour buffer between the flight and their legal limit. If the aircraft is delayed for too long, the crew may decide to call the flight off because they don’t want to exceed their legal time limits. There have even been instances when airport environment congestion has been so bad that a plane that’s on the taxiway waiting for its place in the departure line has to come back to the gate because the crew doesn’t have enough time remaining to legally complete the flight.
Airlines use complex software systems to schedule flight crews efficiently. Ideally, one crew may fly until their time runs out, then a fresh crew replaces them, and the airline keeps running. But this means that crews have to be in certain places at a certain time for this to work.
Weather Keeps Crews On The Ground
In my case, the crew of the flight that I was supposed to take to Chicago was nearing their duty limits. Had the plane taken off on time, this wouldn’t have been a problem. The crew would have landed in Chicago, checked into a hotel, and gotten their rest. However, since a storm was expected to rage through Chicago around the time the aircraft was supposed to land, the flight got delayed. This ate into the crew’s remaining time. My flight wasn’t the only one, as there was another flight to Chicago that was stuck at the gate directly next to ours.
That flight was supposed to be gone by the time I arrived at the Portland International Airport at around 11 in the morning. However, since it couldn’t leave, it took up the gate for my flight, which was supposed to leave at 1:45 in the afternoon.
The delay for both flights stretched out over hours. Eventually, the weather reports indicated that Chicago would be clear for nighttime arrivals and that the earlier Chicago flight was cleared to board its aircraft. By then, it was some five hours into their delay.
Our flight, which had been delayed by three hours by that point, was also supposed to board at the same time. But, we didn’t. Sure enough, that other aircraft was loaded up, towed out to the taxiway, spooled up, and off into the sky it went. I noticed a critical difference between that flight and ours, and it was that no crew ever showed up for our flight.
This angered many passengers. In their eyes, they just saw a flight bound for Chicago take off. Clearly, the weather wasn’t a factor anymore. So why couldn’t we be in their wake?
As the gate agents explained, their crew was fresh and thus had plenty of hours to complete the flight despite the delays. Sadly, the crew for our aircraft had already flown some planes that day, and the three-hour delay was enough to time the crew out. They would not be able to legally conduct the flight.
This simple weather event causes a ripple effect in an airline’s system. The five-hour delay for that one flight will now be realized for the rest of the day. That deficit is not going to be easy to make up in the air, so now whatever flight and crew needs that aircraft next will be delayed, and the delays can continue to send shocks through the system.
As for our flight, now this crew is timed out in Portland when they and their aircraft are supposed to be in Chicago. That means that the crew meant to fly the aircraft next doesn’t have the aircraft, and the airline has to compensate for now having a crew in the wrong place.
In our case, American Airlines looked into its systems and saw that a crew flying in from Phoenix might have just enough duty time remaining to fly the flight to Chicago. Unfortunately, the airline was wrong, as the Phoenix crew had racked up just a little too much time. The more the airline searched, the more it found that the crews headed to Portland just didn’t have enough time to fly to Chicago, and they didn’t have a crew they could put in the seats.
This Has Happened Before
If a particularly harsh weather event strikes a large portion of the United States, it could send an airline into a full-on meltdown. In 2022, for example, a titanic winter storm tore apart the American Airlines scheduling system so hard that it canceled over 11,000 flights. Of course, my luck is terrible, so the flight I was supposed to board was one of them.
The twist? The snowstorm that caused those cancellations happened a week prior. But so many crews ended up in the wrong places at the wrong times with duty hours maxed out, that the system could not keep up with rescheduling. Crews that needed to fly a plane in one city ended up being several states away. Multiply that by thousands of flights, and you have cancelled flights technically due to weather, even though the weather might have been a week ago.
Perhaps the most infamous meltdown in modern history happened in late 2022 when Southwest’s system cratered so hard that the airline had to revert to old-school paper scheduling to climb out of a hole of thousands of canceled flights. Airways Magazine gives a summary of what happened there:
As freezing temperatures and winter conditions spanned throughout many [Southwest Airlines (WN)] hubs, including Dallas Love Field, Chicago Midway, Denver, and others, the carrier’s plan for disrupted operations created a crisis. This required the airline to redesign the carrier schedule, which required multiple departments to do so manually. According to WN, this manual process works the majority of the time. Starting on Christmas Day, Sunday, WN canceled 1,635 flights, which was 46% of its schedule. Then on Monday, it canceled 2,908 flights and around 2,300 flights per day until Friday.
While other US carriers such as United Airlines (UA), Delta Air Lines (DL), and American Airlines (AA) were able to recover at the start of the week, WN continued to cancel flights. Unlike other major US carriers, WN does not utilize the hub-to-spoke model. A majority of its flights are point-to-point. This model is much more vulnerable. However, this point-to-point model has made WN successful. It has allowed passengers to fly directly between smaller cities without connecting through significant hubs such as New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles. Thus, cutting times is a big advantage for passengers flying between these smaller cities.
Additionally, when there is a problem in the WN software, such as in the crew scheduling system, most of the work to fix the problem is not automated. This results in the airline not knowing where crews should be or where planes should be. A separate department, crew scheduling, manually checks flight attendants and pilots to ensure they are following federal work-hour guidelines. Since most crew scheduling was done manually, crew members who could have been working were waiting for hotel arrangements from the airline to adhere to federal guidelines. The phone system has been outworked, and WN did not have enough staff to give scheduling changes to pilots and flight attendants. This has created a ripple effect and affected thousands of Southwest flights across North America.
Keep Calm And Be Nice
In my case, my replacement flight got booked up right as I was trying to secure it. Then my second replacement flight got canceled due to not having a crew available due to the ripple effect from the original cancellation. Even my third replacement flight was a bit quirky. Even though it took off more than 12 hours since the rain stopped, the aircraft had been delayed so much yesterday that it was still delayed by two hours today. That’s the ripple effect in action.
In short, if your flight is getting canceled despite great weather at your destination and the airline tells you it’s because the crew ran out of time, they aren’t lying to you. That crew very likely ran out of buffer time, forcing them into their rest period for the day. Then, because airlines are designed to keep crews and planes flying in a delicate balancing act, the airline probably couldn’t find another crew with enough time remaining. It’s also why, like me, you might even find that your replacement flight gets canceled.
Thankfully, as has been done in the past, eventually the airline will get crews and planes back to where they need to be, even if they need to break out a paper and a pen to do it. As for you, the delay will likely cause some ripple effects in your own life as you scramble to find a replacement flight, retrieve your bags, and find a place to stay for the night.
My recommendation is to remain calm and hatch a backup plan if you need to. But most importantly: Be nice to your gate agents. They aren’t the reason why your flight got canceled, they aren’t in control of the airline’s policies, and sometimes, they know just as much about what happened to your plane as you do. If they tell you it’s because the crew timed out, believe them. It’s a real thing, and now you know a neat fact that you can tell other passengers, too.
(All Images: Author)
This makes me feel pretty good about avoiding any kind of airline rewards/credit cards/miles programs/loyalty & just using my 3%-off-travel costco card on whatever the cheapest flights are. If I was loyal to Delta or whatever I’d end up spending a ton more than I do on flights I bet
This happened to me last month in Edmonton, I was so impressed that people were calm there was no yelling( only internal screaming) I did get to fly out much later that day I got up at 230am and arrived at my destination (a 90 minute flight) at 1230 am the next day
I vaguely remember trying to fly out of Philadelphia to Milwaukee Mitchell (I think) in the middle of winter when my grandmother passed away. I already had a redeye flight and it was snowing something pretty strong. We got delayed about 2 hours so myself and a bunch of the other passengers ended up drinking at the bar. The bar crew stayed for an extra hour and a half because it was so late and we were basically the only ones there. Ended up with an entire crew there with us as they had timed out and they couldn’t get them shuttled to the hotel due to the snow storm. Good times but that was one of the last times I flew anywhere. I prefer to drive
I flew multiple times a month for work for nearly 20 years and consider myself lucky to have had as few delays or outright cancellations as I did. The two worst were both with United going through O’Hare.
The first was a trip from Seattle to South Bend, IN. We got in late to ORD due to WX and after delaying the flight to SBN repeatedly, announced they were going to bus us to SBN. The bus wasn’t big enough for everyone and I got the last seat. I was amazed that someone was still at the Avis counter when we got in after midnight.
The second was from Seattle to Green Bay. I made it to Chicago on time but the leg to GRB was preemptively cancelled due to an incoming blizzard. I rented a car and had a pretty sketchy drive up to Green Bay. United tried to cancel my return flight to SEA from ORD since I didn’t fly that second leg. Our corporate travel department intervened, pointing out how I would still be trying to get a flight to GRB by the time I returned the car at ORD. I think the travel agent noting out how much money our company spent with United annually was what convinced them to go ahead and honor the ticket.
I second your point about keeping calm and being nice. It’s not like the people behind the counters want stuff like this to happen and being rude or worse to them only means that you’re adding stress to people who are already having a rough day.
Weather can also cause other problems. Iwas stuck for four hours trying to land at JFK because the access roads for the fire engines were flooded so we sat on the ground in Philadelphia watching oil refinery flares through the open doors like high tech slum dwellers. I also got to tour the cockpit of the 747 and see the underbelly of the TWA terminal as we ran for the last crew bus
Worth pointing out that whenever a business uses the word “efficiently,” they almost always mean cheaply. It’s cheap to not have crews on standby or have more capacity in the system than you absolutely need under absolutely optimal conditions, and it’s doubly so if you can just offload all the hassle and inconvenience that causes onto the customer without thinking twice about it.
In their defense… many people will buy a ticket on one airline vs. another because it is $5 cheaper. Every penny counts.
That’s in no small part because the entire economy is a market for lemons at this point. Businesses have spent the last 40 years trying to scrape every last penny out of production costs and have basically left the consumer with no reasonable way to assess the actual quality or value of the item they’re purchasing. Combine that with a long concerted effort to push down wages, and yeah, rational consumer behavior is to pay the absolute lowest price they possibly can, because the only thing they can know for sure is the business paid the absolute lowest price it possibly could to provide the item or service it’s now trying to charge the consumer for.
I have been in meetings where we literally tried to take a penny out of a product.
$0.01 in material to us was $0.02 of sales price to our customer. On a product that sold 2,000,000/units per year that change alone paid 1/3rd of my fully weighted salary.
I used to travel a lot for work. If there were significant weather-related cancellations, it always meant I wasn’t flying for at least two days. I would make the decision to settle in and stay or find a non-plane way to get home.
The company was paying for food and lodging, so the extended stay didn’t cost me anything but the hassle of a few more lines on an expense report.
One time I was stuck in Little Rock because of an ice storm hitting that area. I was ready to settle in for a couple of days but went to the nearest Waffle House and realized I should get home. I went back to the airport and rented a car for the drive back to Boston. It was over 24 hours of driving, and the first six or so were through an active ice storm on un-plowed, un-salted highways. Got to see three big rigs jackknife, but I made it home.
I’m always polite with the gate agents. It’s not like they have a secret plane that will fly to my destination but only if I yell loud enough. Dealing with cancellations is a hassle for them as well, and having them re-book me is so much easier than trying to do it on the phone.
Had a flight home from Orlando to PIT from a vacation years ago that was badly delayed with flight crew close to timing out. The Gate Agents explained that this aircraft needed boarded pronto or no one was getting home that night (it was already nearing 1am).
Had many weather issues flying through Chicago for work. Got to MDW once, was informed my flight was cancelled, the next flight was cancelled and the last flight of the night was iffy at best. I just said, book me for tomorrow morning and took the shuttle to a hotel.
Glad you made it, and yes, be kind. it doesn’t cost you anything to be a decent human.
I count it as a win if I just manage to get to my destination the same day I took off, even if I had early morning flights. I also never scheduled anything at the destination the same day I was supposed to arrive. Mutli-hour delays and rescheduling seems to be the norm. It was about 50/50 my flights would arrive on time.
Sometimes you can make lemonade out of the lemons. A couple of years ago was on a flight that was over-booked and at the kiosk when I arrived, I was given the option to take a later flight for up to $500. I signed up since it was the return leg of a business trip and no rush to get home.
When I was called at the gate to change flight, the young gate agent said she could book me on a flight leaving about 5 hours later, and it would be a direct flight and get me home near the original arrival 2-hop time.
I said “okay, that’s a good start – instead of $500, I’ll swap for $800.. and gift cards, not flight voucher” – She gave me a puzzled look. “It’s okay, you can negotiate… let’s make a deal.” I told her.
She paused then said “$700!” – I said “$700 and upgrade for first class” – she then explained that she couldn’t control that but would be happy to give me $700 in gift cards if I change flight. Smiling, I said “Deal!”.
Wound up I got my $700 in gift cards, a nice direct flight home, watched a stupid movie I’d never waste money on (Top Gun 2), and got home only an hour or so later then my original flight.
— everything’s negotiable!
This happened to me in April in Chicago. Original flight time 7:45PM. Mechanical delays. Then weather delays. Taxi to runway around 12:10. Crew has 12 minutes left on the clock. Airport shut down again for weather. Back to the gate, which was a different terminal than the one we left from, so had to schlep back thru TSA again when the flight was rescheduled for 6:40AM. Not a pleasant evening, but I did put in 2 hours of legit work b/c I had more work PC.
When would a plane sitting on the ground make an airline money.
When it’s over insured and on fire.
Do airlines even have full coverage on their planes?
I’m sure Frontier had equivalent coverage to the average Altima, and were probably behind on their monthly payments.
Apparently yes:
“Ground risk hull insurance not in motion
This provides coverage for the insured aircraft against damage when it is on the ground and not in motion. This would provide protection for the aircraft for such events as fire, theft, vandalism, flood, mudslides, animal damage, wind or hailstorms, hangar collapse or for uninsured vehicles or aircraft striking the aircraft. The amount of coverage may be a blue book value or an agreed value that was set when the policy was purchased.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_insurance
So call your agent today!
On a related topic, airport fire fighters don’t try to save the plane. They make a path for the passengers. Pretty much any fire is a full write off.
Makes sense.
Back in the day I used to travel for work 85% of the year, so this has happened to me many times. Probably my favorite time, if such a thing can be said, was on a flight from Wichita to Minneapolis where the inbound plane with our captain was delayed. We had our plane, our flight crew, and our first officer, but no captain. The inbound flight finally arrived five hours late, at which point the captain timed out and another wouldn’t be available for another eight hours. After that announcement, one of the guys napping next to me in the terminal casually got up and walked to the head of the line of people upset at the gate agent, took the mic from the gate agent, and told everyone in the terminal to calm down and he had a solution. He then walked off with everyone looking at him confused, especially the gate agent. Ten minutes later he walked back up to the gate agent, this time in his airline pilot uniform, grabbed the mic again and said he just got off the phone with the airline and he was our new captain and we should start boarding the plane immediately. When we deplaned at MSP I overheard him telling the flight crew he was technically on vacation and he had a connecting flight to Hawaii he needed to rush to so everyone stopped deplaning to let him go while they clapped. It may be the only flight I can recall being on where it was severely delayed and yet everyone was grateful and kind instead of angry when we finally landed at our destination.
That man upgraded himself from flying on vacation for free to getting paid double-time to go on vacation.
Wichita?
Where are you?
I’m in Wichita.
I’m at a motel with this guy I met on the plane.
You shared a motel room with a stranger?
Are you crazy?
I’m getting there.
Did you call the airline?
I have a good chance of getting on standby.
If they told you wolverines make good house pets, would you believe them?
I’m not spending Thanksgiving in Wichita.
I’ll get home.
Mmm.
Not by airplane.
They got 18 hours of air traffic backed up.
We’re going to be having our turkey roll right here.
Gobble gobble!
My dad and I flew out of CLT to DEN to BZN – at least that was the plan. By the time we got to Bozeman 16 hours later, we each had 8 boarding passes on 4 airlines – although we ended up not needing all of them. Weather, time, maintenance and a “mystery” cancelation were all listed as culprits. To their credit, all of the airlines did their best to accommodate us and get us to our destination, often in first class.
Sounds like you have awful luck with air carriers.
Lesson learned: never fly with Mercedes.
Never travel w/ Tom Hanks, ha ha
I have suffered the same fate. I have no problem being delayed for safety. I do wish they would have knowledge of what is going on instead of abandoning the kiosk and not informing us for hours. But yes be nice
I have been a Travelers Aid Chicago ( https://heartlandhumancareservices.org/program/travelers-aid-chicago/ ) volunteer for 18 months. In that time, I have gained a new appreciation for how complicated air travel and airport operations are.
As a veteran passenger of over 2200 commercial flights, I’ve had more flight delays and cancellations that I can count. But I didn’t let them bother me. I was getting paid for my travel, albeit at a lower wage than I made when I was actually on the job, but I was still getting paid by the hour. I didn’t mind delays or cancellations on my way home, as by that time I already had 50, 60, 70, or even 80 hours in that week, so what was a few more hours of time-and-a-half?
Plus that gave me extra time to get all of my paperwork like job reports, test results, and expense reports completed before I got home so once I was finally home, my time was my time. Once the paperwork was complete, I would just read one of the books I brought along until it was time to get something to eat or get on the next flight.
I was always nice to the gate agents in MSP, MKE, DTW, or ORD when I was on my way home to northern Wisconsin. If I missed my flight home due to a late-arriving inbound flight, I’d just ask from what gate the next flight was leaving. I once had a gate agent ask me, “What, you’re not even mad?” (that we didn’t hold the flight for you?) To which I responded, “Will getting mad get me home any sooner?”
She then told me she wished everyone was more like me.
This happened to me. Storms in Dallas delayed a flight from Mexico. The crew ran out of duty time during the delay. I ended up getting a comped night at an all-inclusive resort. Another time the plane had a balance issue and had to divert. Nose heavy flies, tail heavy flies once. Another comped night and meal voucher. It wasn’t at an all-inclusive this time.
One cannot describe the panic that set in back in 2010 when my flight from Sao Paulo to Dulles was cancelled due to “Snowmageddon”
I was a 5 hour connecting flight away from THAT flight. The small regional airport in Recife didn’t have a terminal for the airline running my international flight.
So I hopped on a plane, flew 5 hours deeper into Brazil and away from the only person I know, in hopes of finding a connecting flight.
I just had to get ANY flight back into North America and I could work it from there.
Long story short, after many stressful hours and phoned-in favours, I got a flight into O’Hare and then back onward to Canada.
Being stranded in an airport sucks. Being stranded alone in a country where less than 10% of the population speaks english sucks more.
Uh, from Sao Paolo I would have just flown to Rio and chilled on the beach with some caprahinas and thought about the suckers back home stuck in the snow.
I was 21, it was my first exodus from North America, and I had basically no money.
These days, I probably would’ve done that.
At least PDX is a decent airport to spend some time in.
Yes, the 10 year remodel / overhaul is almost done. The new 9 acre wooden roof is something else.
Are they still selling bits of carpet?
There are still some local vendors selling old carpet squares.
Interesting, I haven’t flown in years and my trip two weeks ago to DC from Bend was Redmond OR to Sea Tac and Dulles. Redmond is still tiny, the parking lot is across the street and you walk past smoke jumper memorabilia to security and a ramp.
I am on an AA flight from PHX -> SNA as I write this. I was supposed to be flying PHX -> ONT, but that flight was delayed 3+ hours for a maintenance issue. I felt that there was a risk of it being canceled eventually, so I let AA schedule me to SNA. Of course, after landing I will need to take an uber/lyft back to ONT to grab my car from airport parking, which kinda sucks. I started the day flying out of PHL to PHX at 7 am Eastern time so I’ve just about had it with air travel today! Plus I’m in the dreaded middle seat on the flight to SNA – at least I’m at the front just behind first class so I should get off the plane quickly.
Here’s another fun one: if a storm–particularly a snow storm–is headed your way, airlines will preemptively reposition their planes so they won’t get snowed-in (a severe storm can close an airport for hours even after the snow stops). Years ago I was taking a dozen teens from Boston to DC. Clear skies in both cities but snow expected 6 hours later so flight cancelled. What a cluster…
Back in January, I was stuck on a plane for an hour in Indy because the jet bridge tires got stuck in a snow drift and needed to be shoveled out (not great when the plane landed at 10pm and was already 3 hours late)
Dang. My weirdest experiences were a jetbridge with a flat tire and a delay bc the boarding door was being swapped out.
Also once I was last to board and there was a miscommunication: the jet bridge started moving under me. Since the plane door was closed, back to the gate I went. The gate agent had already left and since my boarding pass had been scanned, I had a surreal phone conversation when I tried to rebook and was told I was already on the flight.
How did you get lost on the jetbridge?
I was supposed to fly to Miami one February, when Governor Deval Patrick decided to shut down BOS based on the weather forecast.
We got ZERO snow. Not a single flake. The governor caught some sh*t the prior year for his poor handling of a mid-day storm that had school children stuck on buses for 4+ hours while their parents were scrambling to find them. What he did literally forced everyone who had a child in school or a job out of the house to go out onto the over-congested un-plowed streets in the worst part of the storm.
I’m still mad about that missed trip, and hope to meet Deval Patrick some day so I can punch him in the nose.
Ugh. Maybe wait until after my flight this weekend to publish this one?
All kidding aside, this has totally happened to me before. I got stuck in Houston for the night because our flight – the last one of the evening headed to my destination – was delayed for weather, then a maintenance issue. By the time things got resolved, the crew had timed out. We ended up with hotel and food vouchers. Not ideal, but not the worst. As a matter of fact, I was at least grateful they were transparent about what caused the delays/cancellation. I’ve had way too many experiences with airlines who just don’t communicate transparently about the causes of these delays. IMO, they should let people know the underlying cause of a delay. Experienced travelers can use the info to decide if they want to wait it out or book a different flight.
This is one of the big reasons that I don’t fly anymore unless it’s absolutely, positively necessary, like going to Europe. I’ll reluctantly fly for work, but at least I’ll be getting paid and my food and lodging paid for regardless. For my personal vacation travel, I’m driving. Period. That way I am in charge of my schedule, food, environment, and everything else. I can take whatever I want with me, and I never have to step foot in an airport. I have to do that enough for work, I don’t want to do it on vacation.
and the people you sit next. and the seats. and the cost. Drive. Flying sux
Seriously. But when I have to, I make sure to get a flight as early in the morning as possible. The chances of those flights getting delayed by stack ups like Mercedes talks about are close to zero.
Strong disagree here, but this is likely airport dependent. I always shoot for about a 1pm departure when I can. Usually the mornings are the busiest times as far as flights per hour so the slightest thing wrong like a bag delivered to the wrong plane, that tank pumping truck being delayed, etc. can cascade into a whole heap of issues, but by the afternoon most issues have been cleared up. Second reason I hate morning flights is people are generally assholes in the morning, but much more pleasant in the afternoon. You’ve got the double whammy of people grumpy because they had to wake up 6 hours early, and all the entitled business travelers whose 9am meeting is more valuable than the plane they’re flying on so don’t you dare delay it.
I can see that. I usually fly from smaller airports which are pretty chill places once you get through security.
Traffic to the airport is a nightmare, and I’m always doing the ‘am I late’ math in my head while waiting at the same traffic light for three cycles. I’m an anxious person anyway, traffic does not help.
I do the early flight because 4am is about the latest I can leave the house and have a semi-smooth drive to the airport.
If stuff goes wrong with my travel plans at the airport, I’m fine with it. I can’t control that. Once I am in the terminal, I have successfully completed my part of the process.
Flying is awesome…when it works. You booked your aisle seat, find that no one wanted to book a middle seat so you have Xtra free space, the TSA line moved fast, the plane boarded on time, the plane left on time, the plane landed on time, your fellow passengers are civilized rather than the poo-flinging apes that 99% of our genome says we are.
Our vacation this year requires a long flight. But fortunately it’s a direct flight and this should improve the odds of it panning out.
You also have the extra challenge of flying with kids. Which I do not envy. Though I’d also imagine that long roadtrips with them aren’t exactly a picnic, even in the rolling warehouse you guys have.
Over the fifteen years or so I was traveling, air travel changed drastically.
I used to book the latest flight home, but I’d have little trouble getting on an earlier flight if I got to the airport early. I had about an 80% success rate with that for a while. By the end, gate agents would laugh if I even mentioned going standby for an earlier flight.
Open middle seats seem all but extinct after 2008 or so, except on some international flights.
But if you do it enough for work, you have status, no? Status makes a lot of this go away. If you see weather same day change yourself. High enough and they’ll proactively put you on that delayed flight that’s going out since they know your current one isn’t. Flying is much nicer when you rarely have to suffer the ramifications of schedule issues, never sit in a middle seat, and never have to wait in a queue.
But it for sure does suck if you don’t have access to those things.
Status helps, but it doesn’t solve all problems. First, you are limited pretty much to the airline (or in Europe, the airline group); even within an alliance, partner airlines won’t do magic tricks for you. If you are flying out of a fortress city, where one airline dominates, this may not be an issue, but then your ticket prices will be painful.
Second, as Mercedes observed, the economics of flying in the USA are perverse: it’s all about credit card spend. So now status is largely tied to how much you spend on flights and how much you spend on the credit card. In other words, it’s no longer about encouraging you to choose airline X over Y, but rather about encouraging you to pay airline X more money.
So, sure, if you pay to sit in the front, and the company puts you repeatedly on the same route, you’ll have that magic number.
Even then, the same rules apply: keep your situational awareness up, know what may be possible, and be prepared to act at the first sign of trouble.
I’ve got status with one European airline group (where actual flying counts), enough to get the magic phone number. It’s cool when pushback comes to shove and the tug sends the equipment AOG: one call rebooks me without going groundside. But still, in Bucharest recently, I arrived at the gate, saw that I’d been upgraded to business (not that it means much). Then I looked out on the apron, where the ARFF trucks had gathered round the plane. Well, Bucharest requires that you rebook in person, and you get three agents for all 180 passengers and no special treatment. So, status or not, if they’re offloading luggage, get ready to run.
Because of my employer, I have very little discretion in what airline I fly, so pretty much all points I accumulate are with the airline that I hate the most. I also try and avoid work travel whenever possible, so these days I’m only doing work travel once a quarter or so. That doesn’t accumulate much.
I can’t really fly for vacation because I don’t have any way to leave the dogs home.
It’s pet-friendly airbnb’s and a drive for us, which I don’t mind. I’m in New England and there are plenty of destinations within a five hour drive.
Totally legit. Airlines and pets are not a good combination. I have cats, so when I travel, my fairy god-kid house-sits for me to keep the cats company. If I were a dog person, I’d definitely want one that I could travel with.
It was easy getting someone to take care of the cats when we had them.
My dogs are difficult.
It’s much easier for me now that I don’t have a diabetic cat that needs twice-daily insulin injections.
My wife had to take care of my mother in law’s cat that had a thyroid problem and needed ointment rubbed in his ear three times a day.
She’d go there in the morning before work, then run over there during her lunch and then again after work. We have also taken care of everyone else’s easier cats and dogs. Nobody has a problem asking us, but somehow nobody can swing by and take care of our dogs.