Originally Posted by
craz
FiH can I ask did you check prior to arrival to see if there was any mention of the AT not gonna be running? and what if anything was posted?
Nope, I didn't check. The times I have been at JFK during a planned shutdown, there's been a decent attempt by the Port Authority of informing customers. My gripe this past Saturday evening was the shutdown wasn't handled very well. There weren't any signs or staff at the bottom of the escalators (I was in T4) up to the AirTrain warning of the outage; there was only a single person at the AirTrain lobby trying to direct traffic. The display monitors didn't give any helpful information on where the shuttle pickup was located, nor were there any signs or staff helping with that. At the shuttle pick up area, there weren't any Port Authority staff present and a lot of passengers were showing up who were told the entire AirTrain network was off-line so those trying to make terminal connections needlessly left the AirTrain station to go down to the waiting area. There was also no sign of any buses going to either Howard Beach or Jamaica during the 10 or so minutes we stood in the waiting area.
I get that stuff happens, but the alternate recovery operations was really sub-par in this case.