ashill

I understand that. I know that the major roads around here (suburban Philly) are bare and that the snow had pretty much stopped by 9 PM last night (when I last shoveled my driveway and sidewalk; as of this morning, there was no snow that had fallen or drifted onto the shoveled portion). The airport SEPTA line is open (although most of the rest of the public transit system is not operating or sharply limited today). It's a beautiful, sunny day with calm winds.

So I'm rather surprised that the airport is still apparently in such bad shape that they don't expect to have good capacity to land Alaska's flight by 5 PM. (As you say, it's not like AA and other east coast-based planes and crews; the plane just has to get out of Seattle this morning and land safely. I guess I don't know if AS has a crew ready to go here in PHL or other east coast cities to operate the return flights to the west coast.) Oh well. I certainly don't envy the city the responsibility of dealing with clearing all this snow; I'm just skiing here (and wishing they weren't so efficient about clearing the roads -- I can't ski along them!).

ashill

AS 32 SEA-PHL and AS 4 SEA-DCA tomorrow (1/25) both have scheduled stops in STL. Anyone know what that's for? Is it refueling to be prepared to circle over the destination for a long time? It's particularly odd to have a scheduled stop eastbound.

AS Flyer

possibly they are positioning crews to STL today in order to operate these flights tomorrow. The crew will likely fly STL-DCA-SEA or STL-PHL-SEA. They don't have crews positioned in those cities as they got them out in advance of the storm.

ashill

That makes sense. AS Twitter agent says they're fuel stops, though. Makes less sense to me than your guess.

lg20

Could be both. The crew timing issue makes sense, otherwise they would need to fly crews out on other carriers to be able work the return flights. (Or they would have to ferry empty planes back.)

AS Flyer

I don't think the fuel stop is an issue - otherwise they'd be doing fuel stops for SEA-EWR today, which they didn't, or the afternoon DCA. It's a crewing issue I'm fairly certain. Putting crew on another airline probably isn't an option right now since they are probably overbooked for the next week just trying to clear up the 100's of thousands of passengers that have had their flights cancelled.

ashill

Well, I guess once they land in STL, they probably have to fuel up, so I guess that's a plausible hypothesis even if the stop really is due to crewing. Anyway, for my purposes (should I believe that the return PHL-SEA flight will really operate), it's good to have a plausible idea that doesn't mean they don't think they'll be able to land in PHL.

AS Flyer

I assure you that it's to pick up the crew that will work PHL-SEA. They may add fuel only because they would need to because of the stop but it has nothing to do with the weather in PHL. That's over. The airport should be operating normally tomorrow.

crenshaw

I was on the AS 31 return out of PHL Friday. The outbound crew (AS 32) that day did not stay in PHL (duh), they dead-headed back to SEA on Friday evening . So they do need a fresh crew....

ashill

Good to know. I'm well aware that the bad weather here is over and has been for 24 hours. Do you know if today's flight was cancelled because they didn't have a crew to operate the westbound flight and couldn't get one in?

AS Flyer

I honestly don't know why they didn't operate the flight. I don't think it was crew related because they would have gotten a crew in there earlier if they needed to. There were a lot of people who were watching the storms very carefully and ready to do whatever needed to be done. I'm curious also.

beckoa

This is quite interesting ^

Thanks for sharing.

Glad to see stuff come back online and imagine the next week will be a mess. Think some of my luck this weekend on upgrades came from those who didn't make the trek out East...

yvrluver

Thanks for your advise! I contacted them and the immediately reinstated an upgrade for future use!

Westcoaster

Good to hear. Takes some of the sting out of losing the original upgrade.