Originally Posted by
cheaptom
Also, wife had a 55 minute connection in SLC, but the first flight is 40 mins late. Oh well !! Perhaps they'll make up some time in the air, but does Delta ever hold the outbound connecting flights knowing that so many people are running late? (First flight was overweight and they needed 7 volunteers to jump off for $1,000.)
Sometimes, yes. Just because your flight is full doesn't mean that those people are all going to misconnect, they're not going to just hold all outbound flights. Generally a flight might get held if there is a large group from one particular late flight that would cause a large number of misconnects all going to the same place (e.g. harder to recover from) AND holding it won't cause any downstream issues (will this mess up a take off/landing slot? will crew time out? etc). They're not going to hold the flight for your one passenger.