arkyrab

Friday night my DFW to MCO flight was late departing by three hours. As usual announced new departure times sequentially became later with each revision. Our outbound aircraft actually arrived at the gate only about 50 minutes behind schedule but the big problem as announced was that there was no crew available for the departure. So the plane could not leave until another crew landed, could get to our plane and get us going. What I don't understand is why at American Airlines hub DFW AA could not call and obtain a local crew to get us flying sooner. My spouse is a nurse and commonly will be called by her hospital with request offering $ incentive to come in to work when there develops a nursing shortage for patient care. Do airlines do this as well to take care of their customers? If they do would the reason a new crew could not be obtained be that AA would not offer $ incentive enough to cause replacement crew to agree to come work? It seems to me there must be númerous Dallas based AA crew members who would have been available.

JDiver

I feel your pain.

As I understand it, they've reduced their reserve lists to cut costs, as well. Thinner ranks. But it sounds like they may have already called out available flight crew by this time, or that's what they'd do.

What the hospital can do and the airlines can't is offer overtime. Thinking back to dealing with sleep-deprived, frazzled interns, nor would we want that.

Often1

Call outs take time too. On a 3-hour delay with a 50-minute delay on aircraft availability, the operational judgment is whether the call out crew can make it from home to DFW, and to the aircraft in < 2:10. Unless that is the case, it's not even worth considering.

What you also don't know is whether there were other similar situations and thus the call out crews were already enroute to service other flights. DFW-MCO isn't a route likely to arouse a lot of worry as it's a short flight and there are no landing restrictions.

nw6338

Tons of delays/cancellations Thursday and Friday that likely left crews stranded all over the place. Had extra crew riding in the jump seat from LGA-CLT and from CLT-OKC trying to deadhead to other flights. It has been a terrible few days to fly. Be glad that you made it to your destination in a reasonable amount of time given the misery of the past few days on the Eastern seaboard.

Perhaps extra DFW crews were already being used.