Scheduling/communications issues on Eagle at DFW
 

Hello all,
On Sunday, I encountered a frustrating situation at DFW (as did many, I guess, due to the storms early in the day). I arrived on 71 from FRA at about 3:00 in the afternoon, intending to connect to a 16:55 Eagle flight to ABQ. At one point, the RJ flight showed as departing two hours late, so I settled down to rest in the club. Then it changed (in the app and on the flight boards) to "boarding in zero minutes". At the listed gate, the destination board oscillated every twenty minutes or so between showing the destination as ABQ or Monterrey, MX. In the app, it continued to read as boarding in zero minutes. There were 70 or so people listed on the standby list because several other flights to ABQ had been cancelled. They all seemed to be clustered around the gate agent's desk, in no particular sort of line or anything. Every half hour or so, the projected departure time was set to about 10 minutes in the future. After a few hours of this, the gate was changed to another gate that had Wichita (and a much earlier departure time) listed on the destination board but the same old 70 person ABQ standby list showing on the same board. Rolling delays continued for another hour or so until the flight was finally cancelled at about 10:30 PM, just after the last (and only uncancelled, I believe) flight had departed for ABQ. If this account seems confused, that accurately reflects the situation on Sunday at DFW's terminal B. The confusion was not eased by the completely inaccurate occasional communications from the gate agents and the completely inaccurate information on the AA app and the departure boards.

This kind of utter confusion and poor communication seems quite typical of Eagle operations at DFW. I experienced a very similar set of rolling delays and gate changes on Eagle last winter at DFW when there was a weather event in NY that affected AA's ability to deliver crews and planes to DFW.

Is Eagle (or AA, or Mesa, or Envoy, or whoever might be responsible for, you know, running the airline operations) really this bad at what they do? You'd think scheduling crew, plane, gate availability was part of their core business. As more and more AA flights seem to get pushed onto Eagle, are we going to have to get used to this kind of cfuster-luck on our AA flights?

Frustratedly,
saunders111

ps Finally got home by hopping a mainline flight to PHX on Monday morning then connecting to ABQ. The AAgent who answered the "platinum line" was no help finding this, of course; if they had their way, I'd still be sitting in DFW. It used to be my opinion that one of the main advantages of keeping elite status was better customer support when irregular operations hit; I guess I have to revise that view.
pps Sometimes it feels good to rant!

FWIW the PLT line is just regular AAgents; only the EXP line is dedicated.

Beyond that, dunno what to say - weather situations are just incredibly fluid and complex, and operations do tend to break down as the airline tries to react in real time.

During IRROPS, Eagle operations can get messy like this at DFW. I understand that the operations over there are mainly run by Envoy staff. It seems like a lot of last minute allocations of where crews and planes will head can change at the last minute, especially into the evening hours as they determine where planes need to RON.

Communication seems to get a little messy between Envoy staff in the terminal and the "behind the scenes" operations staff making the changes. They really need to notify the staff before just switching things. Once the change is made by operations, the monitors in the terminal update.

I have seen changes on the monitors and the app before the agents know. When this happens, they look terribly surprised and then usually call to see what happened. In my experience, the changes seen on the monitors don't usually go back and forth. Honestly, I would trust the monitors in Terminal B over the agents 9/10 times during IRROPS, since they aren't in as direct communication with AA operations it would seem. I have followed this rule in the past and never had an issue, while the majority of the passengers and the gate agents scratch their heads in confusion of what to do. In the end, these sporadic changes tend to be what is actually happening / going to happen.

All in all, Eagle needs to try to plan better and reduce the number of changes, although they will have to happen from time to time with crew and equipment scheduling for RON and crew timing purposes. I have seen crews switch planes/destinations for RON at the last minute due to inbound delays on prior flights, and if they remained on their original schedules, they would have timed out. The changes, while hectic and may seem numerous to passengers (multiple changes per flight), help ensure that the passengers get on their way vs. cancelling the flights.

It is not just DFW. Terminal E in CLT is a mad house if there is any bad weather. There is a significant amount of room for improvement, even with the understanding that weather is out of their control.