US Airways Dividend Miles (Pre-FlightFund Merger) - US 686 (GSO To PHL)

What a miserable experience yesterday at GSO. Arrive 45 minutes in advance for 686 to Philadelphia, and due to storms in the Northeast flight is delayed. After an hour or so, they announce that due to late incoming aircraft, the flight will go non-stop from GSO to Burlington, VT (which is the stop after Philly). As I am in line to get re-booked, much to my surprise, I overhear the gate agents saying to get the one person to board the flight to Burlington. Sure enough, one person gets on, and the flight pushes back!

After a van ride to Charlotte and more delays, I got into PHL after midnight. Maddening that they took that approach when a bunch of us had goofed up arrangements to get to Philly.

They really must have needed that plane in Burlington that night, otherwise why not fly to PHL and cancel the leg to Burlington?

If they could have flown to PHL, you wouldn't have created this topic.

Since the plane won't do any good sitting in GSO overnight, and there is a flight leaving BVT in the morning (presumably with somebody on it), it makes sense to fly to BVT even if zero passengers were headed there that day.

First off, I want to know if that one person got to sit anywhere they wanted and if they got good service. http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/smile.gif

Edited because I hate extra-long URLs...

Edited again because I'm a moron...

[This message has been edited by StSebastian (edited 07-09-2003).]

[This message has been edited by StSebastian (edited 07-09-2003).]

Check the flight info for the 7th, which shows the PHL potion was canceled.

No reason to leave the plane in GSO overnight, but it really makes more sense to sent it to PHL and Burlington.

Rule #1 when it comes to weather delays:

The positioning of the plane is (more often than not) more important than the location of the passengers. It sounds stupid but in the example above, by taking the plane direct to BVT they probably disrupted the fewest number of passenger itineraries. US probably saw that they could get all the GSO passengers to PHL by sending them through CLT and that the PHL to BVT passengers could be accomidated in some other way (later flight perhaps?). Come the next morning the system is back on schedule.

Also, with the delay, the crew flying the GSO-PHL-BVT flight(s) was probably running out of legal flying time that day as well. If that flight had gone to PHL, then you have both a plane AND a crew in the wrong place. That's a HUGE mess come the next morning.



[This message has been edited by geo1005 (edited 07-09-2003).]