FlyerTalk Forums - View Single Post - Scheduling/communications issues on Eagle at DFW
Old Apr 19, 2016 | 4:27 pm
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saunders111
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Scheduling/communications issues on Eagle at DFW

Hello all,
On Sunday, I encountered a frustrating situation at DFW (as did many, I guess, due to the storms early in the day). I arrived on 71 from FRA at about 3:00 in the afternoon, intending to connect to a 16:55 Eagle flight to ABQ. At one point, the RJ flight showed as departing two hours late, so I settled down to rest in the club. Then it changed (in the app and on the flight boards) to "boarding in zero minutes". At the listed gate, the destination board oscillated every twenty minutes or so between showing the destination as ABQ or Monterrey, MX. In the app, it continued to read as boarding in zero minutes. There were 70 or so people listed on the standby list because several other flights to ABQ had been cancelled. They all seemed to be clustered around the gate agent's desk, in no particular sort of line or anything. Every half hour or so, the projected departure time was set to about 10 minutes in the future. After a few hours of this, the gate was changed to another gate that had Wichita (and a much earlier departure time) listed on the destination board but the same old 70 person ABQ standby list showing on the same board. Rolling delays continued for another hour or so until the flight was finally cancelled at about 10:30 PM, just after the last (and only uncancelled, I believe) flight had departed for ABQ. If this account seems confused, that accurately reflects the situation on Sunday at DFW's terminal B. The confusion was not eased by the completely inaccurate occasional communications from the gate agents and the completely inaccurate information on the AA app and the departure boards.

This kind of utter confusion and poor communication seems quite typical of Eagle operations at DFW. I experienced a very similar set of rolling delays and gate changes on Eagle last winter at DFW when there was a weather event in NY that affected AA's ability to deliver crews and planes to DFW.

Is Eagle (or AA, or Mesa, or Envoy, or whoever might be responsible for, you know, running the airline operations) really this bad at what they do? You'd think scheduling crew, plane, gate availability was part of their core business. As more and more AA flights seem to get pushed onto Eagle, are we going to have to get used to this kind of cfuster-luck on our AA flights?

Frustratedly,
saunders111

ps Finally got home by hopping a mainline flight to PHX on Monday morning then connecting to ABQ. The AAgent who answered the "platinum line" was no help finding this, of course; if they had their way, I'd still be sitting in DFW. It used to be my opinion that one of the main advantages of keeping elite status was better customer support when irregular operations hit; I guess I have to revise that view.
pps Sometimes it feels good to rant!
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