Originally Posted by
traveller001
Comparing data over time is difficult. It mixes in situations where the aircraft might be in LGA ontime or delayed, Enroute delayed for ATC or other reasons or still on a ground delay at an airport upline. Apples to Oranges especially at LGA.
If say a UA inbound flight was already enroute to LGA and would arrive prior to the F9 aircraft it's departure is more assured to be out of LGA earlier. ATC is pretty good at this. FIFO But every go around creates a very dynamic situation.
Also if in addition to local weather ATC may put an airspace flow program into effect and F9 wasn't willing or able to file a flight plan flying around other weather (more $$ fuel burn) and UA was well that's a different issue.
If you posted the date and flight we could look at it more closely vs the UA flights.
I don't see where what I said was not apples to apples. I'm not looking at flights *out of* LGA, I'm looking only at direct late morning flights from DEN *to* LGA. I know there are myriad reasons there may be differences, but I am looking specifically at days when the airlines have reported their delays are due to weather (and not things like the inbound flight is late or something - I filtered those out based on the reported cause of delay information). In other words, in these cases the planes are at the gate and there are no airline-specific problems.
So for some examples, look at 1/30 and 1/31 last week (I looked on Flightaware for this example). The weather in Denver was not an issue, but as is common there were weather delays at LGA. Fair enough, but how were the three DEN-LGA flights scheduled in the 10:00 hour affected?
United 310 (a 757) is regularly scheduled to leave at 10:20AM, and those two days departure times were 10:50AM and 10:55AM. Delta 928 (an A320) is regularly scheduled to depart at 10:50AM - those two days departure was at 1:48PM and 11:23AM respectively. Frontier 510 is scheduled for 10:50AM also (and also an A320) - its departure times for those two days were 3:22PM and 2:23PM.
So, three flights, three airlines, same origin, same destination, scheduled departure times within half an hour of one another, inbound flights not an issue, nothing but the weather (at least reported) as an issue. Yet United was delayed about half an hour each day, Delta was delayed 3 hours the first day and half an hour the other, while Frontier was delayed 4-1/2 and 3-1/2 hours.
Assuming that ATC at LGA is calling the shots as to who leaves when (which is what I was told by Frontier and I have no reason to think that's not true), I'm trying to understand what is the basis for these differences. As I noted in my earlier post, looking at 11 months of daily data for United and Frontier for this route and time suggests these are not random, isolated incidents but reflect a pattern. I found that over 4 times out of 5 when Frontier had a lengthy weather-related delay, United did not. Presumably there is some reason for this pattern, I just don't know what it is.