Originally Posted by
skycrab
I'm curious to hear whether it is normal behaviour of airlines to continue to show flights as "en-route" and on-time when the plane has clearly suffered a loss of cabin pressure, and returned to point of origin, and landed.
Just watched AA45 return to CDG after about 1 hour, and has been on the ground for nearly 30 minutes but aa.com continues to show it as in-flight and on-time.
A return to field (RTF) requires that someone manually build a new segment onto AA45's original line of flight. Since it was normally routed CDG-XXX, now it's routed CDG-CDG-XXX. Sounds trivial, but until someone actually builds the new segment (and gives it ETDs, ship number, crew, etc.) then the website, and other sites won't be able to display it correctly. The primary goal in a RTF is to get the plane on the ground. Secondary is planning the service recovery. If they don't immediately know when an A/C or crew will be available, it may take some time.
If a flight is really in trouble (i.e. an accident), then yes, the airline internally locks down all access to flight info to a very small group so that (por ejemplo) Joe Agent can't download the pax list and sent it to CNN.