wizzy

Yesterday afternoon was flying from IAD->ORD.

16:50 - original departure time
17:45 - new departure time
18:00 - everyone at gate, agent indicates they are waiting for crew
18:10 - flight time change to 19:30
18:15 - agent in AC checks computer, finds that crew is still at hotel because they had been told that wheel's up wasn't until later
19:00 - flight boards, pulls away, given wheels up around 20:00
19:50 - wheels up
21:35 - lands in ORD, pilot told no gate, and no ETA on when we could get a gate
22:15 - arrive at gate

If AA can notify the crew hours earlier that flight time has been delayed, why don't they post this information? It was clear that the gate agents had no idea what was going on with the pilots, and passengers were getting very upset with the lack of information.

AAFA

Don't feel so bad because most of the time they don't tell us either. Usually the only time they do tell us is when we are scheduled for multiple legs. If they change our departure time they also change when our duty day begins.
If they tell all the passengers of a later time then if the flight leaves a little earlier nobody will make it through security while the crew can breeze right through.

More often than not they don't tell us and we arrive at the airport and sit, and sit, and sit.

My favorite are the creeping delays where 10 minutes turns into 1 hour and then 2 and then 3. You know how we usually find out there is an aircraft change? Nobody calls us. (pilots and FAs) We usually hear about it from catering! They come to the door, open it, and start removing our carts. When we ask what's up they tell us that our plane is out of service. It's really amazing that catering knows before us 98% of the time. The only time they don't is when the pilots know for sure that our problem is something that definitely can't be quickly fixed.

In MIA the airport, not the airline, runs the monitors. I have had many situations where the monitor says the plane is delayed and we all go to operations only to have people madly paging us that they aircraft is on time and they have no idea where we heard it wasn't. Then we walk to the gate as passengers run past us who think they are late for the flight we are working. I don't know how they do it in MIA but most of the time they don't get it right. One day they fool me with the monitor and the next day I look at the computer and show up to that gate and it turns out the monitor is right.

FFMilesJunkie

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

gemac

I always thought that the reason why delays were not announced was that passengers with fully flexible tickets would walk over to a competitor's flight and get on it.