LTRS

Yes, but it is NOT reality as announced by the pilot. It is AA based reality designed to cover their butt for hotel vouchers.

JohnFortWorth

That may be, but the line about thunderstorms and the diversion was entered into the system at 6:42pm, more than an hour before the flight landed in Springfield.

brp

Well, that's a good question. Of course, why is what the pilot says reality?

I don't know the actual source of the information, or whether they could simply lie and say that there were thunderstorms when there were not. I suspect not, and what some sort of "confirmable" data have to go in there, but I don't know the reporting requirements. Perhaps it was sunny and clear at STL, and they put in the thunderstorm stuff to avoid paying for rooms after the missed the airport. A definite possibility.

Cheers.

JohnFortWorth

Sorry. The flight arrived at the gate in St. Louis at 7:53. It looks like this line and the line about the diversion due to thunderstorms was entered by the AA station in St. Louis.

LTRS

Well, because pilots don't have any motivation to lie to passengers beyond kissing butt to the airline that employs them. So in the instances where they reveal the truth you can generally believe them.

All evidence points to the fact that this airplane was hurried out of DSM to keep their on-time record intact, regardless of the impact on safety or ongoing connections of the passengers.

Had they re-fueled properly they would have been able to go up over the very mild and quick moving storm and landed at STL within a reasonable timeframe. Instead they choose to not refuel and put their passengers safety and their travel plans at stake.

And that is the point ... they gambled to save a few bucks knowing full well that it was the passengers that would pay if they lost the bet. Not cool.

We need a federal passengers bill of rights law!

brp

Safety is a stretch. Perhaps they knew that there were plenty of places that they could easily land (as they did) in the event of weather. While I don't agree with you about the rest, I see your point. But there is absolutely no evidence that safety was, in any way compromised.

Cheers.

LTRS

I do apprecaite your reply, but if you work for AA surely you realize their system means nothing in relation to reality. Just yesterday I was in ORD and their system said final boarding when the flight I was on was not only not boarding but was 40 min late boarding. IOW, we were 30 plus minutes away from boarding when their system was saying "final boarding."

AA has a major problem with their "system" verus reality on the ground. I wouldn't trust a damn thing AA system's says.

JohnFortWorth

A good idea in concept, but such a law would have to be enforced either by giving passengers a private right of action against the airlines or by creating a federal regulatory bureaucracy to enforce the regulations.

JohnFortWorth

Actually, I don't work for AA. I worked for Delta back in the 80's, so I can still speak Sabre. (If you think flight information is hard to read, try reading PNR history.)

Some flight information is manually entered by the station and some gets generated automatically (like "on" and "off" times). As I mentioned earlier, these entries were made by someone at the St. Louis station, and you are correct that they would be the people handling the misconnected passengers when they arrived.

jrhone

The facts are as follows..

The aircraft arrived with 2667 lbs of fuel, it left with 4665 lbs of fuel. More than enough to have arrived in STL with sufficent reserve for a considerable hold time if their landing slot provided by ATC was within a reasonable time

According to the radar image from

http://www.wunderground.com/history/...theprefvalue=1

(shows thunderstorms rolling through between 5 and 8 PM so the dopplar matches AA's facts in this case )


I'm sorry, but the comments about putting passengers lives at risk to save a few bucks are ill informed and unwarranted.

LTRS

Well apparently the pilot did not agree. He attributed it to a decision not re-fuel in DES. And they diverted to re-fuel, so that appears to clear that argument, no?

JDiver

Though I understand your feelings of frustration, you might actually thank the poster - there are plenty of ways to decipher what the information means, and you don't even have to know all the aviation lingo to do so. stl tstms - uh, St. Louis thunderstorms?

As I am sure you have experienced, weather "prediction" is still an art, not so much science. One can get a weather briefing and an hour later, the storm has changed direction, developed much higher storm clouds and winds than predicted, etc. The a/c PIC (pilot in command) departed with sufficient fuel to arrive at the destination, and have a margin for error (reserve fuel.) The storm encountered was different from the storm predicted, end of story.

Aviation has changed much since the '40s and '50s on one hand, and not so much in other areas - weather is still a major source of disruption, and especially so given that airlines have higher utilization rates and more complicated routings than those days had - and that also means fewer a/c at their disposal to fill in for cancellations, etc. If one really, really needs to be there, one should still plan earlier flights and some "buffer" time, because airline travel is far from seamless.

That's my POV as a pilot and one who has flown commercially over 60 years.

LTRS

And what would be so wrong with that? They wouldn't have to create a "new" regulatory body. The most common sense would be to create an FAA board to enforce it. And in actuality that is what they would probably do.

jrhone

Curious too, the flight arrived at gate C6 as 7.53, the passengers (three of them ) on two 8.15 departures that left from C16 and C21 and were onboard . The other 13 passengers all made their connections . On the 8.15 departures, the only misconnects on them were coming in from LGA (and one of the 8.15 departures was delayed )

LTRS

Yeah, that sound great, but it's not actually the reason the flight was diverted according to the pilot flying the plane. Some have disputed this, but you're a pilot -- were you in the habit of lying about the reasons for a diversion?

I appreciate the poster, but one thing I learned in my business is not to provide people with a 150 character list of abbreviations and not expect questions from lay folks (I actually learned that about 20 yrs ago). His/her efforts are certainly appreciated but if you don't work in the actual field of aviation that is not helpful info. Especially when it contradicts the pilot flying the plane.