rustykettel

Reading the pilots forums, it's sounds like it is an AS issue too. Apparently AS rampers don't handle the deicing anymore and some of the deicing was done incorrectly yesterday.

ctporter

My flight was MCO SEA, supposed to leave at 5:30pm (or so) so I decided to go ahead and get to airport a little early 2:45pm. Sadly, my plane ended up with a 5.5hr delay due to the mess at SEA. The incoming AS 16 did not get into MCO until 9:45pm or so, it was 4:30am Eastern by the time we got to SEA. The most amazing part was how cheerful, friendly, upbeat, and positive GA at MCO was while handling the PDX delay, then the SAN delay, and finally our SEA delay. Amazing crew at the gate!

jk88usa

FYI It's looking ugly again tomorrow. North winds and light snow forecasted by the FAA all morning and into the early afternoon. Really looking forward to my DL flight which was delayed 7 hours on Friday in the same sort of mess...

rustykettel

Alaska has cancelled 34 flights for tomorrow already.

https://blog.alaskaair.com/travel-ad...inter-weather/

Interesting tidbit: deicing contractor will double the number of deicing trucks from Friday, and AS is planning for a sustainable rate of 15 planes an hour. The unwritten implication is that they could only deice 7-8 planes an hour on Friday. Ouch.

jrl767

booked on the 0610 Mon to LAX ... glad I don’t have to be in the El Segundo office until 1400

rustykettel

Interesting. Appears there isn't an actual travel waiver posted for SEA, just wait and see. Call center will rebook you.

Quote:

Seattle Travel Advisory

A new round of light snow is expected on Sunday morning that will result in cancelled flights in and out of Seattle Sunday morning. Guests will be notified if their flight is impacted and will be rebooked by the Call Center.

Guests are advised to check flight status before heading to the airport. Also, sign up for flight notifications and we'll notify you of any last-minute delays, cancellations or gate changes on your flights by email or text message.

drvannostren

This is what YVR used to be like. All the companies had to do their own de-icing, most of it was done on the gates or on 1 single pad near the gates and things like that. It was a disaster.

I'm not gonna say Aeromag is perfect, but winter ops have improved a lot since they were brought in as a dedicated de-icer. The airport made changes and gave them a major chunk of the west pad to be able to de-ice on the fly, drive-in, drive-out. It's still not perfect, it never will be, but it's much better. Sidebar: I'd love to see an automatic de-ice facility, like a drive-thru car wash type deal. Wonder if it could ever be pulled off.

It's just embarrassing to cause so many issues from a relatively small weather event. AS/DL want to have big operations at SEA, but the operation just doesn't work in situations like this.

My criticism of AS is only the way they've dealt with some of them. Obviously they don't wanna compensate people, but citing weather as the cancellation reason at 6pm when that no longer had anything to do with it isn't cool.

drvannostren

The other thing I forgot to mention, just in case anyone isn't aware, there's a shelf life of the de-icing fluid. I forget the word but you know what I mean. Once the plane gets de-iced, it's gotta be up in the air within like 30-45 minutes I think, otherwise it's gotta get sprayed again. So that doesn't help matters.

I'm not sure if it's a per airline thing but I know in the past I worked for an airline where the de-icing decision was up to the pilots. Got a chance to listen to pilot vs. dispatch one day. Pilots wanted de-ice type 4, dispatch said it wasn't necessary and cost too much. Pilot disagreed. In the end the flight was cancelled because if they used type 4 they would've operated the flight at a loss and the pilot wasn't willing to back down.

Crzn33k

AS rampers never deiced
It was maint who did that job

Orwaid

Hi -

Yes, weather is a problem. $hit happens.I get it.

It is how AS is responding to it. When passengers find out they are on their own, that is not the AS I knew.

When they go completely silent to their customer base instead of being transparent and accountable to all of their stakeholders, that is not the AS I knew.

And I will be a 75K again this year. It is not like I don't fly the airline. But it seems they can't take care of their customer base in their main hub, in their anchor city. And THAT ought to concern everyone.

seacarl

Has AS ever been good on IRROPs? Even for elites?

My experience has been that they are hard to reach (by phone) in major IRROPs and that they are reluctant to protect you on other carriers.

On some routes where they only fly once or twice a day, they want to rebook you days later. When it impacts the SEA hub, it's a major disaster.

As they have gotten bigger, AS needs to step up their game in IRROPs situations

eponymous_coward

Yes. I've found they are fine on IRROPs. I contacted them when SEA was FUBAR on snow and got LAS-SFO-SEA on VX (originally) and then LAS-SEA(VX)-SFO(AS) after that. Got through to a rep pretty quickly both times (in early Feb 2017). YMMV.

seacarl

I tried calling 3 different times on Friday - I'm 75K and used the 888 phone number that's on my card, entered my MP#, and could not get through. It offered a call back but it would not recognize my phone number nor the DTMF signals on my cell phone when I tried to enter it. I stayed on hold for 40 minutes (was quoted 12-20 minute hold time.)

Sounds like you got lucky. It probably helps to be on routes with multiple frequencies.

eponymous_coward

It's not the only time I've "gotten lucky" on IRROPS in my 10+ years as an elite, but YMMV. And yes, multiple frequencies helps, but if SEA is FUBAR and your origin/destination is SEA...

cblaisd

Depending on who is on the Twitter desk, I've had both excellent help (and not so excellent) using that venue.