I think so many of the worst impacts could have been avoided if EK had pre-emptively cancelled some of their flights based on the forecasts and offered change fee waivers for the day of the rain and the day after.
A lot of other airlines do this. It's unclear why EK does not. As with a lot of things relating to wait times (road traffic, queues, etc) a slight reduction in input can mean a massive improvement in throughput during a capacity shortage. There's entire textbooks written by the queueing theory geeks which explain this in good detail.
EK229 to Seattle has been cancelled for 3 days in a row now.
Most passengers are reasonable, but the communication from the company has been very poor. From what I hear, the customer service people at the airport did not seem to have the authority to do anything despite the extraordinary circumstances.
Hopefully they'll have a solid response plan in place for the inevitable next storm, which could be worse than this one.
Flood water keeps rising long after the rain ends. And desert land is more likely to flood from rain than moist land. This means their response plan has to assume waterlogging both inside and outside the airfield long after the rains have stopped.
100%
They really could have handled it much better. It seems odd that operations were running somewhat better (at least from flights I kept an eye on) 2 days ago than they were today.
To have a rolling delay on a ULH flight is insane to me. They should have just canceled flights from the get go. If I had arrived on a delayed connecting flight into DXB expecting to board my ULH flight, only to be faced with rolling delays for 14hrs and then to be told past midnight that the flight is canceled, I would be absolutely livid. And I would've been in the solace of the F lounge. I can't even imagine what it would've been like for those down in the main concourse.
It was infuriating to watch the status of my inbound flight face those delays all day, and then get canceled.
I think EK having had the luxury of not having to worry about weather events like this in the past put them in the position of having absolutely no idea how to effectively manage a halt on basically their entire operation. I have been flying EK consistently for about 12 years and I have never seen them in such bad shape.
Anyway, there's my rant as I had to book Air India to get me from JFK to HYD tomorrow, as EK said no seats available in F until Saturday and thats too late for me. Already missing a day full of meetings.
On the bright side, it is one of AI's new ex EY 77Ws so at least the suite will do.
Hoping EK is somewhat back to normal for my return late next week.