Will be interesting to see how much this cascades throughout the day. I’m booked on a 9:30pm flight from Atlanta to the west coast - still scheduled for now, but I’ll be watching to see how affected that last bank of domestic flights will be.
I’m assuming the ATL experience will be more hectic than usual today!
I was one of the few lucky ones, I got out of ATL last night on the only ATL-ONT flight that operated Friday, and was only about 2 hours late. Had the shortest pre-check line I've ever seen there (I suppose everyone was either already airside waiting or at home cancelled). But every other line - baggage assistance, check in counters, need assistance desks, gate agent desks, even lots of food locations were the longest I've ever seen. Lots of folks camping out in the A-B rainforest tunnel too. With so many planes and crews out of place, it's starting to feel like the big WN Christmas meltdown disaster. I guess we avoided a double whammy yesterday, as the predicted thunderstorms in Atlanta didn't materialize near the airport, though it did rain a lot.
We had a plane and pilots, but not enough available FAs. Our departure time kept getting pushed back, and flights left and right (literally the gates left and right) were announcing cancellations. I ended up booking backup flights for Sunday on WN and a DL points redemption to SNA. Kudos to our crew and gate agents working together for getting us out -- there was a new FA team that volunteered to work the flight but had to wait for approval; that wait put us really close to the pilots timing out. It's the first time I've heard applause for a boarding call! At the start of boarding the gate agents said they'd close the door in about 20 minutes so that the pilots wouldn't time out and anyone not onboard wouldn't be getting on. (Don't know how true that was, as everyone got on in the end - but it was certainly the fastest boarding process on DL I've ever seen - getting us closer to one of the famous WN 30 minute turns!). No wifi on our A321, but I think everyone was just happy to be on a flight - several people had rebooked from other Los Angeles area flights that were cancelled, and one person said this was their 5th attempt getting out of Atlanta.
Hoping everyone's travel gets resolved soon and that DL management answers some tough questions, but I'm really appreciative of the efforts of the frontline employees to get this delayed flight out quickly when it could have very easily been cancelled due to crew timeouts.