Originally Posted by
seawolf
Not sure what exactly are you expressing displeasure at. AA continue to delay vs just cancel outright?
Posting impossible times? If that, this is operational not IT.
AA doing rolling delays of 20 minutes when those 20 minutes are clearly not enough to be viable.
2 examples
- CLT-IAH - Aircraft is on the ground at 2:00 PM EST for a departure at 3:01 EST. Checking EF, the flight is awaiting crew, however 3:01 is still there. Per the GA, the crew in inbound from LAS, I search and find that they will be on the ground at 3:40 EST
- At 3:10, the departure time changes to 3:08
- At 3:15 it changes to 3:30
- 3:30 to 3:50
- 3:50 to 4:10
- Finally departed at 4:12 PM EST
- DEN-DFW - Departure at 4:00 PM. At 3:45 PM, the aircraft is still in DFW and just pushed back from the gate. Which means that the flight is 100% not leaving anytime soon from DEN; likely departure is 6:00 PM MST at the earliest.
- 4:00 PM it changes to 4:15 PM
- 4:15 to 4:40
- 4:40 to 5:05
- 5:05 to 5:30
- 5:30 to 6:00
- Finally depart at 6:30 PM MST
There are cases where unexpected things happen. I had a flight that was delayed as IAH-LGA was forced to deboard due to an NY ground stop, holding up the gate and leaving our incoming aircraft stuck waiting on the tarmac. In these cases, it makes sense that AA doesn't know when things will clear. However, cases like the 2 above are very common and seemingly consistent
only at AA. This is what pisses everyone off - Customers get frustrated by lack of information and people can't go back to the lounge, get food, go sit down (those with EF and knowing AA can, but most aren't that familiar.
The biggest issue, IMO, is that by posting unrealistic arrival times, AA won't let you change your flight. "DEN-DFW is only delayed by 20 mins, you're fine", when you know that it's actually delayed by 2+ hours and you will miss your connection. This burned me in LHR as they did the same thing with the rolling delays, refused to allow me to proactively move to the next DFW-IAH flight. Lo and behold, we missed DFW-IAH and ended up getting downgraded and scattered across the cabin. It's a 40 min flight, so don't care about the downgrade much but I had my SO's 12 and 11 year old nephews with me. Not so much fun having someone else's kids that you're in charge of scattered around the cabin.
Originally Posted by
seawolf
The evening before they did roll delay a flight out repeatedly from 9PM to after midnight despite equipment on the ground and even returns to gate but that is due to ATC and AA needed the aircraft to operate the 6AM at outstation back.
This does happen and I'm not referring to these cases. This can happen on all airlines - maintenance and weather aren't easily predicted.
tl;dr AA does a bad job of posting delays realistically. UA and DL, by comparison, don't do this; on UA if the inbound is delayed due to MX, the screens show "Late arriving aircraft due to Maintenance delay" and a realistic time that takes into account the flying time from where the aircraft is to where you are.