It got a lot worse today (Sunday 4/22). I watched LAX's inbound delay increase as the afternoon went on, from 77 minutes to over three hours. I know not all traffic was subjected to this extreme of a delay, however I did watch United's (Skywest) evening departure to LAX get delayed and delayed again until it was finally cancelled. And apparently the poor crew (and thus the pax) didn't know they had an EDCT (departure delay) until after they had pushed back. So they sat on a taxiway for an hour or so before coming back to the gate, and then finding out that their time had been pushed back a third time, which is the point at which the flight was cancelled I think. The aircraft ended up eventually departing SAT for FAT and the pilot told SAT ATC that about half the pax had elected to travel to FAT, even with no guarantee of transportation to LAX.

I have two observations here, and perhaps someone can either correct me or add-on.

1. Does it seem likely that there will be greater impact to the regionals first? In other words, more immediate impact to regionals than mainline. I know American/American Eagle has something of a history of doing this during IROPS.

2. What I observed tonight may have been just a random event, but I wonder how much of an effort the airlines will go to to at least get aircraft moved from place to place that might be somewhere in the vicinity of where the scheduled destination was. Not that FAT is really anywhere close to LAX, but perhaps there were a few pax whose final destination was somewhere in the Central Valley or Bay Area, and thus found some benefit in this re-routing. Doesn't seem like this kind of re-routing would be cost-effective or just plain realistic for the airlines in a lot of scenarios (maybe that aircraft was just scheduled to be at FAT at the end of the day), but I am curious to hear other people's insight and experiences as this situation develops.