On the surface, things looked much better this year for long ground delays, and really, they were. There were three flights that sat on the runway for more than 3 hours during June 2010. In June 2009, that number was a whopping 278. This year, none sat for more than 4 hours. Last year, it was 42.

So did cancellations spike as a result? A little, but not much. Though the DOT would like you to think that both this year and last saw no change at 1.5 percent of flights canceled, that’s only thanks to rounding. In 2009, it was 1.48 percent. In 2010, it was 1.50 percent. So there was a very slight increase. In fact, three fewer flights were canceled this year but with 6,307 fewer flights operating.

Sounds like a tremendous success, right? Well, it’s good news for some, but it’s important to look at other factors year-over-year to see how we may have ended up in this place.

First, we have to remember that after last summer, the airlines did ramp up their efforts to reduce lengthy ground delays. So some of the reduction should be related to previous efforts and not simply the introduction of this rule. We’ll never know exactly what that is. But we can still dig in and see what happened last June. You’ll notice that the weather was significantly better, despite what many have said.

The Air Travel Consumer Report doesn’t give specifics on the flights that were delayed for three hours, but it does do it for the flights delayed more than 4 hours. So let’s focus on those. There were 42 of those, and most of them occurred during specific events. For example, 13 of them (11 at Dulles) happened in Washington on June 3, 2009. That’s the day that thunderstorms came and sat on top of Dulles from 8p to 10p.

So the weather was bad, but something had to be just as bad this year, right? Nope. In June, there were a couple days with quick passing storms, but the only day that saw sustained thunderstorms over a long period was June 28 when storms sat on Dulles from 145p to 3p, still a much shorter time period, especially when you’re looking at a 3 hour limit.

But the key is the time of day. I looked at flights scheduled on August 12, 2010 as a comparison. Not much should have changed between last year and this year. Between 145p and 3p, there are only 29 flights scheduled to arrive and 15 scheduled to depart. That’s an average of 23.2 arrivals per hour and 12 departures per hour during the time of the storm. Meanwhile, between 8p and 10p, 82 flights are scheduled to arrive and 32 scheduled to depart. Think about that, that’s 41 arrivals per hour or 16 departures. That’s a significant difference.

On top of that, the imbalance of arrivals to departures is huge at night. That’s because a lot of planes come in and stay the night before flying out in the morning. That means that the gates are full at night, so if planes don’t push back to depart on time, then arrivals have nowhere to go. That’s not usually the case during the day. And don’t underestimate the 2 hours of storms this year versus 1.25 hours last year. That’s a huge difference when 3 hours is your cutoff.

There were a couple other events we could look at in June 2009 as well, but I could paint a story for those too. I think the point is clear. Knowing that thunderstorms tend to be the biggest culprit for long ground delays during the summer, June was a luckier weather month in 2010 than it was in 2009.

That being said, even if we had the exact same weather this year, I would bet the performance would still have been better. Simply being more cognizant about the situation would have reduced the number of ground delays, but that’s going to have happened even if this rule didn’t exist.

The bottom line is that the DOT can’t have it both ways. If it wants to just use superficial results to advance its claim, go right ahead. But then don’t tell people who do more in-depth reviews that it’s too early to look at the results. This is a far more complicated issue than either the DOT or the pro-rule people want to admit.

Who cares if Southwest considers a mechanical problem under its control or not, right? You should, actually. Airlines make clear distinctions on how much they’ll help stranded customers depending upon whether it was due to circumstances within the airline’s control or not. Here’s a handy chart explaining what’s within airline control and what isn’t, traditionally.

It’s relatively straight forward. If it’s something that an airline can have control over, then it’s the airline’s responsibility. But what’s the difference for passengers? If something is within an airline’s control, then the airline will generally pay for hotels and meals while you’re waiting. The airline will also, in many cases, put you on another airline if available. If the event is outside an airline’s control, then you’re on your own. The airline will get you out when it has a seat available on its own flights, but that’s about it. You’re entitled to a full refund in both cases, assuming there’s a cancellation or excessive delay.

So why do I say that this isn’t as big of a deal here for Southwest? Southwest doesn’t put people on other airlines anyway. If you have a problem on Southwest, you’re waiting for the next seat on a Southwest flight or you’re taking your refund elsewhere. So it’s really just an issue of meals and hotels, not nearly as big of a deal but still important.

For all airlines, the contract of carriage is the binding document regarding air transportation, so this move in Southwest’s contract of carriage (PDF) is worrying, but Southwest also has its Customer Service Commitment (PDF) which outlines what it will do when things go wrong.

The Customer Service Commitment clearly states:

. . . if circumstances within our control, such as aircraft “swaps,” cause you to miss the last possible flight (or connection) of the day to your destination,
our Customer Service personnel have the authority to arrange for overnight lodging. We will find a hotel or motel as near to the airport as possible, and at no additional cost to you. We may also arrange for ground transportation to the overnight facility.

If the cause of your inconvenience is not within our means of control, we will do our best to assist you by securing a discounted rate at a hotel or motel at or near the airport.

With the underlying definition of “circumstances within our control” being clarified, it does make me wary. If a flight cancels because a plane breaks and there are no more flights that day, Southwest is now clearly not obligated to put you in a hotel for the night. Whether that holds up in practice or not remains to be seen, but it’s certainly a concern.

Southwest says that it simply clarified the definition of this in its contract of carriage but that it didn’t intend to change policies. That may be true, but from a legal perspective, that doesn’t appear to be the case.

[Updated on 7/28 @ 1234p: Southwest has listened to everyone and further clarified its contract of carriage to say mechanical difficulties from other entities. Smart move. Read the post on the Southwest blog at http://www.blogsouthwest.com/blog/southwest-airlines-addresses-misinterpretation-regarding-contract-carriage]

[Original photo via Flicker user swanksalot]

On-time percentage in May 2010 was 79.9 percent across all reporting airlines. It was 80.5 percent in 2009, so it was comparable in that respect. Then we look at cancellations. In 2010, 1.24 percent of flights were canceled. Back in 2009? It was only 0.88 percent. Had the May 2009 rate held through in 2010, nearly 2,000 fewer flights would have been canceled in May of this year. If you assume an average of 100 people on a flight, you get almost 200,000 people who were inconvenienced this year that wouldn’t have been inconvenienced last year. Many have said that it was a small increase in cancellations. That seems pretty big to me.

Now, let’s look at the number of lengthy ground delays. In May 2009, there were 34 flights stuck on the ramp for more than 3 hours. This year, there were 5. If we stick with that 100 passenger per flight number, then we’re at 3,400 people who weren’t sitting on a plane on the ground for more than 3 hours this year. Remember, that compares to an increase of nearly 200,000 people who were inconvenienced by cancellations. Let me put this in a pretty picture:

Are we really making a fair comparison here? After all, there’s no way to directly attribute all the additional cancellations to this rule. There are differences in weather that could also cause large swings. But the increase in cancellations was spread out across airlines. Of the 18 reporting airlines, two-thirds reported an increase in the number of cancellations. Weather alone is not going to cause that to be spread across the country, though it can certainly count for some of it.

But that doesn’t really matter. There’s an even better way to look at this. If only 1.5 percent of those additional cancellations were due to the ground delay rule, then more people still would have been inconvenienced by higher cancellations than were saved from three hour delays. And that assumes that the reduction in long ground delays was entirely due to the new rule, something that’s highly unlikely.

But let’s not stop there. Lets look at the five long ground delays. Four of them were on United in Denver on May 26. That was the day that not only saw thunderstorms roll through the airport, but it also saw a tornado hit. Yeah, think the weather was bad? Maybe we can forgive four airplanes being stuck for that long.

The last one was Delta flight 2011 from Atlanta to Dallas/Ft Worth on May 28. Both airports saw thunderstorms that afternoon, but Atlanta had more than an inch and a half of rain. It was an awful day.

The Delta flight was stuck on the ground for 3 hours and 2 minutes. Yeah, that’s right. It went a mere two minutes over the limit. So I asked Delta what happened. Apparently, the airplane was in a “bad spot” on taxiway and there was lightning so the ramp workers couldn’t come out to meet the airplane. Had the airplane come back to the gate, it would have canceled and the passengers wouldn’t have gotten out of town for at least 10 to 12 hours.

That’s just one more example of when a 3 hour and 2 minute delay isn’t nearly as bad as the alternative. Of course, Kate Hanni, the director of FlyersRights.org thinks it’s a good idea to gloat. She has been quoted as saying “I hate to say I told you so, but I told you so.”

Despite Kate’s claim, there is nothing to gloat about. More people are being inconvenienced than before. So, Kate, I hate to say I told you so, but I told you so.

Virgin America’s First Quarter Loss Means More Work Ahead for Troubled Airline – BNET
The first quarter numbers are in, and once again, it’s a loss.

Subsidy reservations: Kansas taxpayers support airlines in Wichita, but KCI complains of turbulence – Kansas City Star
It’s an interesting situation in Wichita these days when it comes to airline subsidies, and the Kansas City Star dug in on the subject.

Facebook Fan Numbers Aren’t Nearly as Important as Airports May Think – BNET
There’s a lot of hype about Facebook and Twitter, but it shouldn’t be a race to collect fans. It’s all about how to deal with them.

Random Expansion: Virgin America Is Going to Regret Its New Flights to Mexico – BNET
My take on Virgin America’s move into Mexico. Wanna guess how I feel?

Open Skies Turns to Trains to Help Fill Airplanes – BNET
Open Skies has no feed on either end of its network, so it’s looking at trains. I like it.

Google Acquires ITA Software, and the Likes of Kayak and Bing Cry a Little – BNET
Personally, I think the acquisition of ITA by Google could be just awesome. But there are definitely going to be some unhappy campers.

Some of you may know that I write the monthly newsletters for PASSUR Aerospace. PASSUR is a very cool little company that actually has its own private radar network at over 100 airports, primarily in the US and Canada. There are a million things that they do with this data, but as I was putting together the current newsletter, I found out about a temporary but truly awesome project going on at JFK during the runway construction that’s happening today. They’ve effectively created virtual queues so that airplanes don’t have to push off the gate until it’s closer to actual departure time.

Here’s how it works. During peak periods (operational for ten hours a day), a central command coordinates all departures and arrivals at the airport. A couple hours before scheduled departure time, each flight is assigned an actual departure time by the system. So maybe your flight was supposed to leave at 1p, but at 11a, the airline will be advised that the departure time will now be 2p. That means they can keep you at the gate and let you roam free. If they need that gate for an arriving flight, they can still board you and then push you out of the gate, but you’ll have a very clear picture of when you will actually take off. Expectations can be set appropriately, and they shouldn’t push you off the gate if a 3 hour delay is anticipated.

The result of this is that at any one time you end up with no more than eight airplanes waiting to take off (you need some kind of buffer in there) instead of 30 or more. This is good for passengers, but it’s also good for airlines. When they’re in that long line waiting for takeoff, they have to keep an engine running, sucking up gas as they wait. Now that won’t be an issue. In addition, if the winds shift and the airport needs to turn around and use different runways, there are fewer planes that need to be turned around so it can be done more quickly.

Awesome, right? Now this isn’t a fail-proof solution. When bad weather rolls in, that messes a lot of things up. A version of this system is actually used during severe weather events now at JFK for metering departures, but it doesn’t solve everything. If you have a ton of planes coming in on diversions or several planes landing while others can’t take off, you may need to free up gate space due to storms. Things can and will still go wrong, but this process is a big improvement.

So how has this been working? Well, during March 2010, they were able to handle just about the same amount of traffic as they handled in March 2009 but with one runway down for construction. Taxi-out times are virtually the same. And the average delay has actually gone down by about 5 minutes. Great stuff.

Unfortunately, this program is currently scheduled to end on June 30, when the big construction work on the runway is done. With any luck, the airport will see the benefit and decide to keep it around . . . and then hopefully other delay-prone airports will consider it as well.

[Original Photos via AZ DOT and abdallahh]

Dispatch is an airline’s “Mission Control” center, and I’ve worked in one as a dispatcher for upwards of 30 years. A flight crew might operate 3-5 flights per day, but the average dispatcher works ten times that many flights in a single shift, and has a more-detailed awareness and understanding of the various problem areas within the airline’s route system. The dispatcher is also the one that plans the flight, including the routes, the alternates, and the fuel load, and is also the one passing along updated info to the crew while enroute. When weather hits, we’re also the ones that divert flights, and sometimes, if need be, we also cancel them.

There are two separate and distinct problems with delays, yet Ms. Hanni and her band of followers don’t seem to be able to discern the critical differences between them. In the last decade or so, there have been a handful of scenarios that produced 7+ hour delays, including, of course, the thunderstorms that caused Ms. Hanni’s American flight to be diverted to Austin. Admittedly, all the above situations were intolerable and handled poorly, and these are the “apples” when it comes to the issue of ground delays.

With respect to the delay Ms. Hanni suffered, I captured an image of the radar that night, and there was a big low pressure system anchored over west Texas resulting in a lengthy line of thunderstorms oriented north-to-south in central Texas. I’m sure Ms. Hanni and her ilk probably think a thunderstorm is a thunderstorm, but there are many variables associated with them that vary the net operational impact, such as coverage (Isolated? Scattered? Broken? Solid line?); movement; trend; tops (Permitting aircraft to fly over them, or not); and the potential for the weather to “train” over the same location on the ground. The cells in that line of thunderstorms in Texas the night of Ms. Hanni’s flight moved south-to-north and kept DFW in the weather much longer than had this been the more typical line of thunderstorms one sees with an approaching cold front which quickly moves W-E or NW-SE.

I’ve already mentioned the rare “apples” of the ground delay issues. The “oranges” are the much more common 2-4 hour delays one sees when thunderstorms impact major airports or regions, especially on the east coast. Ms. Hanni’s “solution” to the “apples” problem is NOT going to solve the “oranges” problem, yet I think the majority of Ms. Hanni’s success with her movement has been the ability to tap into the general public’s mistaken notions that ALL delays are equally evil no matter how short the duration; that EVERY operational situation is predictable by the airline with 100% accuracy; and that ANYTIME anything goes wrong it’s the automatic fault of the airline. There is no one-size-fits all solution here. Let’s look at some common-sense tests, assumptions, misassumptions, and observations:

• The general public can relate to the fact that their cross-town car trip will take 1x time in good weather and with dry roads, 2x time if it’s raining, and maybe 3x time if there’s snow or ice. Is it such a stretch to conclude that aircraft are similarly slowed down in such conditions?
• Does it make sense that airlines enjoy delays, or perhaps are they just forced to tolerate them, since (last time I looked) the airlines have no control over the weather? Nobody at an airline “likes” delays, but we realize that a good many of them are the unfortunate cost of doing business within the current ATC system. (The “oranges”, not the “apples.”)
• Likewise, does it make sense that airlines have the ability (at 11:07am) to predict with absolute certainty that a thunderstorm (or fog, or whatever) will impact XYZ airport at 5:23pm, or 6:03pm, or 7:16pm? Once bad weather starts occurring, will it end 1:23 from now, or 2:10 from now, or 3:33 from now?
• The concept of airspace capacity constraints is a foreign one to the general public, as they look up at all that sky and assume (incorrectly) that it has unlimited capacity. All that open sky, and there’s no room for my one flight? Again, that’s an individual flight perspective, and one that ignores systemic issues.
• As far as “just returning to a gate” and “just getting some portable stairs and buses” go, where can airlines (and airports) find the magic wands needed conjure up these extra resources (and additional gates) when needed on short notice? Should every airport have double the number of gates normally used “just in case” problems occur? Should Phoenix have the same number of snow plows that Anchorage does? What’s reasonable for an airport to have?
• Airport capacity is a variable commodity, and not a constant one. Look at the San Francisco airport acceptance rate (AAR) chart, for example. Notice that the AAR (a per hour figure) can vary greatly depending upon what runway(s) are, or are not in use. AAR is the “supply” and the flights that airlines (and non-airlines) fly into the airport are the “demand”. When demand is less than supply, things are good, but when the weather such as surface winds, cloud ceilings, visibilities change (often suddenly, despite forecasts) and drive a change to the runways in use that involve a drop in the AAR, demand then exceeds supply, and delays ensue. Some flights in the air will need to circle, and may even have to divert. Some flights that haven’t departed (still on a gate, or on a taxiway awaiting departure) will be delayed (think metered freeway on ramp here).

• If a thunderstorm event precludes aircraft from landing at XYZ airport for 2 hours, and XYZ normally handles 50 flights per hour, that’s 100 flights that are going to be affected, and they don’t just all disappear. Some will be able to hold and get in, others will hold and divert to alternates. Of those flights diverting, some will cancel, and some will refuel and try and go back to XYZ. Once the weather improves at XYZ, ATC will be working a backlog of traffic—things don’t immediately snap back to normal once the weather clears out.
• If airline schedules are restricted such to always be able to fall within an airport’s worst-case AAR, you’ll be “solving” a problem that maybe occurs 20% of the time and unnecessarily restricting things during the 80% of the time when it’s not warranted.
• If we say it’s foggy at XYZ and you tell the customer service agent the weather is OK at Aunt Tilly’s house nearby, that’s nice, but it’s only relevant if we’re shooting approaches to Aunt Tilly’s house and landing in her driveway. It’s the weather at the airport that counts. (You’d be genuinely surprised at how often this comes up.)
• One hears a great deal about “NextGen” ATC stuff, and while it will help in some operational contexts, it won’t in many others such as runway capacity. Also, if one is trying to get from LaGuardia to O’Hare and there’s a solid line of thunderstorms from Toronto to Atlanta topping 50,000 feet, it matters not whether the flight is navigating using VORs, GPS, Boy Scout compass, or taxiing on Interstate 80–you’re NOT going to get through the weather, and there will be delays.
• Please keep in mind that airline employees are not all interchangeable. Customer contact personnel don’t have detailed knowledge of the specifics of ATC delays, only that there are ATC delays. Likewise, many pilots only have their viewpoint of their specific flight, and not much awareness of any systemic issues. It’s no different than walking into a hospital. It’s unreasonable to expect detailed surgical questions to be answered by anyone other than by a surgeon—an admissions clerk won’t do–and it’s unreasonable to expect that clerk to be trained to answer surgical questions.

In closing, I’ll reiterate that nothing that I’ve written should be construed as acceptance of the delay that Ms. Hanni and others experienced in that handful of really lengthy delay situations. Irrespective of however well-meaning her efforts might have been, her pushing of a one-size-fits-all solution is going to end up being severely counter-productive. By DOT’s new 3-hour rule and the huge fines the airlines are now facing, it is the height of financial irresponsibility (if not insanity) for any airline to risk allowing EACH aircraft that busts the 3-hour limit to incur a multi-million dollar fine. Pre-emptive cancellations will occur earlier than the 3-hour mark, so as to ensure aircraft can get through any taxiway gridlock and get back to the gate before the bell does “ding” at 3 hours.

On Time Performance
As usual, Hawaiian was the best, though it couldn’t crack 90 percent on time. It helps to do most of your flying around the mostly weather-free islands, so I always ignore their results. Alaska was next with 85.8 percent on time, probably showing that the Pacific Northwest has had a relatively mild winter this year. Then comes United with 83.7 percent, a great showing. But wait, we don’t know that for sure. Nearly half United’s flights are actually operated by another airline as United Express. (This doesn’t even count codesharing with alliance partners.) But those results all fall under that operating airline.

So SkyWest, which does a fair bit of flying for United, posted only a 74.6 percent rating, but that won’t show up in United’s numbers. That’s why I find these numbers hard to use and hard to trust. So how can we break these down and get more meaningful info? Well we can’t do it precisely, but we can start to approximate. Take a look at SkyWest again. They do most of their flying for either United or Delta and we don’t know how they did for each. How can we figure that out? They do break it down by arrival airport, so we can dig in that way.

In Denver, SkyWest had 78.4 percent of flights arrive on time (United had 88.6 percent). At LAX it was 79.6 percent (87.2 percent for United) and in Chicago it was 69.5 percent (84.2 percent for United). In San Francisco, SkyWest had a dreadful 53.2 percent while United had 76.9 percent. It’s a safe bet that the vast majority of those flights were operated for United.

On the other hand, SkyWest had an 81.9 percent on time arrival rate in Salt Lake compared to Delta’s even better 89.7 percent. Those were mostly operated for Delta. What does this tell us? It shows that no matter who you’re flying, regionals tend to operate fewer flights on time than the majors. The reason is that when the weather ramps up, smaller airplanes tend to get delayed first because fewer people are inconvenienced than if a big plane gets delayed. But it shows that the numbers you see are certainly deceiving. The DOT needs to change this.

Consistently Late Flights
Here’s a great reason why these numbers are again rough. Hawaiian may have had the best on time performance, but guess what? Of all the flights that were delayed at least 80 percent of the time in January, a full 40% were operated by Hawaiian. So they may have good on time performance in general, but don’t try to tell that to all the people stuck on those six flight numbers from the mainland.

But just because a plane is consistently late doesn’t mean it’s the worst thing around. For example, a whopping 87.1 percent of the time, Delta flight 6578 from Kansas City to JFK (operated by Comair) was delayed by an average of 34 minutes. That’s bad, but it’s not nearly as bad as Skywest 5942 between San Francisco and Sacramento. That flight was operated as United Express, and it was “only” late 83.87 percent of the time. But guess what? It was late an average of 92 minutes. You could drive there faster.

Flight Cancellations
When we look at flight cancellations, we can really see the plan to impact regional flights over mainline flights in place. Regional carriers filled the top 6 spots when it came to cancellation percentage with Pinnacle taking the cake with a 4.1 percent cancellation rate. US Airways was the top mainline carrier with 3 percent, but again, when you fill in the blanks with express carriers, it might change things entirely. We just don’t have that kind of visibility, especially since their two wholly-owned carriers (Piedmont and PSA) aren’t included in the data at all.

Ramp Delays Over 3 Hours
In January, there were only two flights with ramp delays over 4 hours, both Delta flights. The first was from Ft Myers to LaGuardia. That flight diverted to Harrisburg to wait out the weather. It waited for a long friggin’ time, but it did eventually go. With the new rule, this flight would simply have canceled in Harrisburg and some alternate mode of transportation would have had to be arranged, probably a bus.

The second was a flight from Charlotte to Atlanta. They were delayed coming out of Charlotte because of bad weather in Atlanta. In fact, there were a bunch of weather diversions into Charlotte so the gates were all filled and they couldn’t get back to the gate. They now have a procedure set up to get people off on the ramp.

Moving down to 3 hour delays, there were 21 flights that were delayed over that limit for a .004% rate out of all flights. Delta had the most with 8.

Mishandled Bags
I really hate this number. I’ve written about this in the distant past, but let me refresh your memories. The mishandled bag number is the number of lost bags per 1,000 passengers. What a stupid number. So one month you could have 1,000 passengers that check no bags and the next they could check 3 bags each. The number needs to be the number of lost bags per 1,000 checked bags. I won’t even bother here.

Complaints
This is another rough measure, because it’s only complaints that reach the DOT. People don’t generally complain to the DOT unless the airline hasn’t helped them. So this is a better measure of what airlines aren’t helping their customers (or which airlines have the most irrational customers) than it is a measure of which airlines people have complaints with.

The metric shows the number of complaints per hundred thousand passengers, so for some of these airlines, the numbers are so small that year over year comparisons aren’t great. For example, in January 2008, Atlantic Southeast had .96 complaints per hundred thousand passengers, but this January it plunged to .30 complaints. Hooray! Oh wait. They had a total of 3 complaints for the entire month, down from 9 the year before. That’s such a small number that it’s hard to really draw any conclusions.

The other problem here is how complaints are allocated. If we look at the breakdown, there were 927 total complaints in January. Of those, 109 were related to reservations/ticketing/boarding. It’s going to be hard for Atlantic Southeast to get any complaints in that category since they don’t handle those functions. They have a bunch in baggage as well. What if it’s going from an express flight to a mainline flight? Whose fault is that? If the mainline carriers handles the ground handling for both, then it should be the mainline carrier, but if it’s tied to a flight number, it may fall to the express carrier.

Again, it’s the problem of operational carrier vs marketing carrier that clouds things here. We really need to have everyone show their numbers by marketing carrier to really make things fair.

You probably know that the weather in New York was simply horrendous last week. It was shockingly bad to the point where JFK stopped operating for awhile when wind gusts reach more than 70 kts. Now, a ton of flights were canceled, but Virgin America 404 wasn’t one of them.

The plane took off from LAX at 734a and diverted to New York’s Stewart/Newburgh Airport when it couldn’t land at JFK. The plane landed at 515p, meaning it was in the air for nearly 7 hours. What you’ll see in other news outlets is that the people were trapped on the plane for hours and hours, getting verbally abused by the crew. Now let’s get the full story.

The plane had already been circling New York for awhile, hoping for a gap in the weather to open up. That didn’t happen and they were running low on fuel, so they went to Stewart and passengers sat there for 4.5 hours. Upon landing, there were no gates available; they were filled by JetBlue diversions. So, the plane went to what’s called a hardstand. Basically, that’s an empty spot where they could park.

Thirty five minutes after parking, they rolled up airstairs and gave people the option to get off. Some got off right then. Another couple groups left over the next couple hours totaling twenty people in all. Passengers were quickly served water and more was brought to the plane when they ran low. The lavs were working the whole time. About halfway through the sit, they ran out of food, though people could have gone in to the airport if they wanted.

Through the ground sit, Virgin America kept monitoring the weather and hoping that they would be allowed to takeoff again. Things kept changing rapidly but they got worse instead of better as originally expected. Four hours into the ground sit, Virgin America decided to cancel the flight and bus people to JFK instead. The plane did eventually take off without passengers and went back to New York to position it for its next flight.

So what really went wrong here? It sounds like the crew had a meltdown of sorts. There are reports of crewmembers snapping at the passengers and getting angry. You can watch some snippets of what seems like good cockpit communication here, but I guess the fireworks happened later. That was probably the only thing that really should have been done differently.

Let’s go down the checklist.

• Were passengers trapped on a plane for more than 3 hours without being allowed to leave? No.
• Did the lavs work? Yes.
• Were passengers provided food and water? Yes, until they ran out of food, but people could have gone into the terminal.
• Did the crew give constant updates? It seemed like the pilot did a good job.

So as far as handling goes, things went somewhat by the book. And the three hour rule wouldn’t have applied here. But regarding the long wait on the plane, well, the quickly changing weather was the culprit. There was no mass conspiracy to keep people on a plane. They honestly thought they were going to be able to get out of there.

Still, the flight attendants losing their cool is a huge problem, and whether it’s their fault or whether it came due to lack of support from the airline itself doesn’t matter. The airline is responsible, and they owned up to it quite nicely. The CEO of social media site Kontain was onboard and updating frequently (link posted above), and Virgin America saw it. CEO David Cush immediately reached out and offered a personal apology. He sent a written apology to each passenger, gave them full refunds, and gave a credit for a future flight.

Things go wrong, we know that. In this case, the weather didn’t cooperate and the flight attendants seemed to have trouble handling the situation. But the airline recovered nicely. Overall, a nasty situation was handled quite well. Had the flight attendants handled things better, we probably wouldn’t have even heard about this.

[http://www.flickr.com/photos/spine/ / CC BY 2.0]

Update 3/18 @ 726p: Virgin America has posted a very detailed report (PDF) on its website if you want full details. Also, it appears that I was wrong. Since they ran out of food a couple hours in, that technically would have been a violation of the new 3 hour rule despite doing absolutely everything else right.

Regular readers of the blog know that I’m not a fan of the Passenger Bill of Rights. On the other side, we have Kate Hanni who thinks it’s absolutely necessary. When I saw this quote from Kate Hanni, founder of FlyersRights.org and stranded passenger back in 2006, I just had to talk to her.

Passenger advocates say that airlines don’t need to cancel flights to prevent tarmac delays. “This is solvable” without excess cancellations, said Kate Hanni, who founded Flyersrights.org after a flight she was on in 2006 was stranded.

Oh, really? I had to learn what her solution was here since nobody else seems to know it, so I called her up. Here’s the first part of our conversation. Part Two will go live tomorrow.

Cranky: Hello Kate. I saw you quoted as saying that this new rule shouldn’t be a big issue and that it won’t cause more cancellations, so I’m hoping you can explain how that’s the case.
Kate: They’re trying to convince the American people to be very afraid. See, they should have canceled flights already. They should have depeaked their schedules in New York, Atlanta, Dallas, and all the other airports where they schedule too many flights at one time but they haven’t done it. No measures have worked to get them to reduce their schedules. Are you aware of what the schedules look like at JFK? Are you aware that in the best of all conditions, the airlines can only have 81 flights per hour? Airlines overschedule in the morning. If they were to wait until 9 or 10am, this wouldn’t be a problem.

Cranky: Well, the problem is that people don’t want to fly at those times.
Kate: A lot of people would want to be flying at those times. The airlines drum up demand, get flights but they don’t have room. I know that if I could get a cheaper flight at 10am than 7am, I would.

Cranky: Leisure travelers yeah but business travelers not so much.
Kate: I’m a business traveler and I know. I have to fly from San Francisco to New York all the time. My husband is a business traveler as well and we would both fly at different times.

Cranky: But delays aren’t always the airlines’ fault. There are others responsible for these issues as well.
Kate: The airlines entirely control from the pushback of the plane out until the penalty box.

Cranky: But if they don’t push back, they don’t get in line for takeoff.
Kate: Trust me that I know exactly what’s going on. I have maps of the no-movement areas versus the movement areas. I’ve sat down with MIT professors and air traffic controllers and they say this is the way it is. It’s one of their own [airline] employees that’s telling that jet to push back from the gate and sit. Air traffic control has nothing to do with the movement of that jet.

Cranky: Wait, how often do you see an airplane push back but they don’t want to take off?
Kate: Approximately 10 times a day. Mostly in New York. We see it happen a lot at Reagan, even at Dallas. A lot at Chicago.

Cranky: But hold on. Why would an airline push this plane back and sit there for no reason?
Kate: Money. If they let you off the plane, if they leave you in the terminal, you have choices. You could migrate to a different airline. Migrate to a rental car, migrate to a train. You might say that I’ll try a different carrier.

Cranky: But no airline wants to push back and just sit there. Why would they push back if they weren’t trying to take off?
Kate: Because they’re clearing gates so incoming jets can clear gates. But the second reason is that they don’t want you leaving.

Cranky: Let me try to explain my question better. You say that the airlines are at fault for keeping airplanes sitting on the ground and it’s not air traffic control’s fault. Airlines want to get airplanes moving so they can pick up their next planeload of paying passengers, so why would they just push back and not take off if it’s not air traffic control causing the hold ups?
Kate: They do want to take off but they can’t because there are too many flights scheduled. Every morning at many many airports there is overscheduling in the best of all conditions and those planes are not going to take off. [The airlines] are going to grab revenue and then keep it.

Tomorrow, we’ll pick up where we left off. As you can see, Kate has basically boiled this down to, in her eyes, a simple issue of overscheduling. If the airlines would simply change their flights to go at off-peak times, everything would be solved. But there is a problem. Despite what Kate and her husband are willing to do, most business travelers, the bread and butter of most airlines, aren’t going to be that flexible. This is especially true on the short haul flights because people want to be able to do day trips. It’s even worse in New York because of all the competition.

Let’s forget that the afternoons are the worst times in New York and not the mornings and use Kate’s example. Right now, US Airways has its first flight to LaGuardia at 748a and its second at 1021a. If US Airways gets rid of that 748a flight, all those business travelers looking for a day trip will head over to Newark to take the 805a on Continental. US Airways is not going to do that.

If overscheduling truly is the biggest issue and not anything else (which is somewhat debatable), then the question should be why the government hasn’t instituted more strict slot controls instead of this rule. That would more directly address the problem instead of this rule, which will have far more unintended consequences for travelers. It will, of course, not help when weather goes bad and airport capacity gets reduced, so there’s no magic bullet.

These are the questions that I ask in Part Two, which will be posted tomorrow.

US Airways and Continental See Different Fortunes with United at Washington/Dulles – BNET
As Continental ramps up Dulles, US Airways cuts back. Clearly they’re each seeing different opportunities with United.

Three Reasons Why Delta Slashed First Class Fares Between New York and the West Coast – BNET
Delta made some pretty steep cuts to First Class fares between New York and LA/SF last week. Here’s why I think they did it.

Airlines find coach travelers willing to pay extra for perks – Chicago Sun Times
This week, the Sun Times took on the issue of fees, and I was asked to comment.