iahphx

It doesn't seem to have attracted much attention, but US apparently had to cancel a significant number of flights around the Holidays because they ran out of flight crews. In a not unreasonable effort to make some extra money, US apparently increased their schedules around the busy Holiday travel dates. But then the massive storm cancellations earlier in the month and the subsequent rearranging of flight crew schedules left them without crews to man the increased schedule. Holiday flights were then preemptively cancelled days in advance. This must have gone reasonably well, as I don't see any public outroar.

Can anyone shed more light on what actually happened? Parker is saying the airline will be less aggressive in the future in adding peak-day flights due to this experience.

tommyleo

If he said that, then things did not go well. Maybe the delays didn't make the news because the news media was more interested in pursuing the bomb attempt and the new security measures? Just my guess.

I flew through PHX on 1/1 and saw the cancellations on the boards. A TA explained to me that crews had timed out due to weather in different parts of the country and that a "domino effect" had occurred. But she did not say that it was a result of the storm on 12/18-12/19. That seems a bit far out to cause issues (almost two weeks later), but perhaps it could be possible if a certain percentage of crew members had taken the holidays off already.

BoeingBoy

There were 2 peaks for mainline - after Christmas the cancellations hit 120 one day and New Year's weekend hit 185 one day. The total for December mainline equaled about 75% of one day's normal flights and January didn't settle down till about the 5th-6th. It was primarily a shortage of crews, although weather did play a part some days.

Jim

mrwise

So that's what it was! A couple of my friends flying from DCA-TPA had the misfortune of being bumped from both outbound and inbound flights, due to 'crew non-availability'. I was really surprised to hear this, but it now makes sense, since they were booked on Dec 25th and Jan 1st.

DCWolverine

I flew DCA-TPA on 12/27, the day after the infamous flood at DCA. Of course, DCA was a madhouse that morning, with thousands of holiday travelers having their flights cancelled the day before. US check-in ops at DCA was VERY under-staffed. Since so many flights were oversold already, was a disaster to get everyone rebooked and checked-in.

The worst part was that in US's typical wisdom, they removed the Preferred line, and just told Preferred's to wait in the VERY long line. Fortunatey, a very nice agent found me a supervisor (since I'd already been rebooked on Delta and just needed a printout of a paper ticket), and he handled everything incredibly well.

But aside from the supervisor (Danny Santiago), it was a complete mess at DCA, partly because they didn't seem to have nearly enough staff to handle the huge crush of pax with cancelled flights due to the flood.

SFOisHome

We were supposed to fly FLL-PHX then PHX-FLL on 1/3 but it got cancelled becuase of crew availability. We were kindly rebooked on 1/6, which didn't work for either of us, then finally put on Delta MIA-JFK-SLC-SFO and MIA-SLC-JFK-OAK. Lucky for us our JFK-SLC Delta leg got cancelled for mx after sitting on the tarmac fro 1hr, so we were able to get a nonstop JFK-SFO. Complete Nightmare.

IADCAflyer

We didnt get hammered by crew issues. We got to deal with the power outage at DCA which made it impossible to clear security....