I flew through DFW on Sunday, RIC-DFW-SFO.
DFW-RIC (my inbound) arrived RIC on-time, around 11:15am. Scheduled departure RIC-DFW was noon, but we ended up pushing back closer to 1pm due to fuel loading... we were expecting a very long flight path, down to the Gulf Coast and then north up to DFW.
However: we ended up diverting to McAllen (MFE), along with maybe 3-4 other planes. In at MFE at 4:15pm CT -- and got a gate. Some folks got off to drive places in TX (I heard SAT and AUS). I somewhat expected the worst -- a long multi-hour delay or crew time-out, but we had a very legal crew and a gate (yay!) and were pushed back and airborne by 5:20pm, on the gate at DFW at 7pm.
DFW was a zoo, as others have reported. Massive lines at all gates and even the AC (I went to A, where I stood in a line for about 40 min before abandoning). There were some flights showing 7+ hr delays -- I saw DCA and LGA 1pm flights posted for 8:30pm departures.
I ended up on an 8:40pm DFW-SFO, delayed to 10:30pm -- all things considered, not so bad. Throughout the course of the day, I had been protected on three earlier flights (none of which I could have made because of the MFE diversion, but I'd been proactively working to ensure I was booked on).
My big takeaways:
- inventory is super-fluid: I would be looking at EF for DFW-SFO and simply refreshing over and over would show seats popping up, flights going Y0 to Y1 to Y0 to Y2 to Y1 to Y0 in the matter of 30 second spans... which makes it really hard if you're trying for protection, because if you see space, by the time you get an agent to help you, it's gone... I tried calling Australia AA, Twitter, and EXP -- and unless you happen to have an agent just when a seat would pop (and I tried stalling in my interactions just to see if a seat would pop up), you're out of luck... but keep keep trying... seats will pop up
- AA is zeroing out seats/flights proactively: the DFW-SFO I got on was showing F0 Y0 but had only 5 people booked in F -- they simply weren't making the inventory available to give greatest leeway to the GAs -- it meant many folks cleared upgrade on a flight that was ostensibly full -- and even in Y, the seat map looked really open (don't know how many folks were booked without seats, but tons of people did make standby, suggesting the flight wasn't booked to capacity in Y, either). Moving gate to gate for standby is worth it, especially if you have status and are higher up the list -- people are clearing onto the flights
My staff interactions were all really positive and agents seemed to be handling the stress pretty well. The Twitter feed was incredibly vitriolic -- pax vocally complaining, much of it unjustified, I think