Bad Weather, Tough Choices

How Airline Employees
Make Hundreds of Decisions
To Cancel or Reroute Flights
By MELANIE TROTTMAN
Wall Street Journal
February 14, 2006; Page B1

American Airlines has 80,000 employees who help make flights possible. It has four who cancel them. Danny Burgin is one of those four.

Early Sunday morning, as a record-setting blizzard moved up the East Coast, paralyzing roads, railroads and airports with as much as 27 inches of snow, Mr. Burgin arrived for work at American Airlines' Fort Worth, Texas, control center and took a deep breath.

It was 6 a.m., and already nearly 24,000 customers, originally scheduled to fly on Saturday, had seen their flights canceled. Facing Mr. Burgin, 55 years old, as he sat in front of a horseshoe-shaped command post, was a bank of computer screens full of blinking lights and data streams, feeding him constantly updated information. Tracking hundreds of flights across American's U.S. and international maps, he had to help decide which should be canceled or rerouted. But first he needed more information.

....snip

I'm not sure if this link will work, but it was in Tuesday's Wall Street Journal

http://online.wsj.com/article_email/...DgxODQ1Wj.html