Your Airline Flight Can Be Canceled After A Storm Even If The Skies Are Totally Clear, And The Reason Why Makes Total Sense

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)