Originally Posted by
dmodemd
I was scheduled on yesterday's AS 642 SEA-DFW at 12:25pm. In the morning I saw the snow bearing down on the area earlier than expected. I thought maybe I could just get out before it got bad but the radar said otherwise. I knew that if I did not get off the ground I may not even be able to get back home and be stuck at the airport for the next 24 hours or more. My wife implored me to not go... I took her advice and scrubbed my week's trip and work remotely. Watching the flight after the fact, I saw that it was able to "depart" on time so I told her, "ah... I could have made it out after all!". The warm air was coming in rapidly and it did not look like the snow was sticking to the roads so much so I figured the airport was fine Didn't think much about it again until the evening when we decided to see how the AS and AA DFW flights did. We noticed AS 642 showed a return to SEA about an hour after departure... huh?! Also an AA flight the same... then AS 642 took off later in the evening. So we saw that they all got stuck in the parade to get out. I also just read that Seatac got 2 inches of snow in one hour in the afternoon. Wow... I would have been pretty peeved to almost make it out and then sent back.
AS 642 can consider themselves lucky they got into DFW after midnight... many flights never got out.
i think I was on the return flight for that crew, which operated with a 7+ hr delay due to their late arrival into DFW (for me it was actually a 20 hr delay since I was originally booked on a late afternoon flight the day before that canceled, forcing an overnight).
What was supposed to be a breakfast flight turned into a 7-11 catered lunch flight.
And it really turned out to be a bit of a mess of a flight. After departing from the gate and nearly reaching our runway at DFW we returned back to the gate where they removed a sick passenger. Then when we arrived at SEA our C gate was occupied and we sat around for around 45 minutes before heading to the N Gates.