Early-landing flights that become delayed flights due to no available gate has become routine for me. You can land 40 minutes early, but it will take them 60 minutes to locate a gate. Just glad I'm not flying this summer!

Seconded. The only requirement is for inventory in the same cabin. Even that is negotiable since airport agents (not phone agents) can oversell a lower cabin if there are seats available in a higher one.

Sadly this is the often the case with Eagle flights at LAX. Often you are landing on the North runway, so there is a long taxi involved to get around to the other side of the airport. If it's an AM arrival, you will be waiting in a long line for a bus to T4/T6. It's painful and there is really nothing that they can do to improve the taxi situation. They could schedule the busses a bit better knowing how many people are arriving/departing at certain times of the day.

^

I got double pwned between LAX-ORD - there is no ORD-LAX 787 anymore (at least not on the day I'm flying) and they cut away the LAX-ORD 6pm departure which means connecting from HKG-LAX is not feasible anymore (OTOH there are now 3 red-eyes for this route...)

I wonder if being PMUS agents had something to do with it.

So am I better off calling in or heading to an AC?

My normal plan has been to go to an AC if the airport has one, and calling in if not.

I call the EXP desk as I am walking to the AC. In general I find the EXP desk somewhat better at doing rerouting.

I'm so tired of AA purposely lying about on-time departures. Am on 2386 today. Inbound from MEX is delayed with estimated arrival 35 minutes before 2386 departure. No way for 2386 to depart on-time with an inbound int'l arrival that requires a security sweep. The agents at the admirals club said this keeps happening and it's frustrating everyone. Why has AA ops become so terrible on very basic things? Fix it.

Trying to see potential silver lining here:

If it were me, I'd just keep taking this route, budgeting time accordingly for the delay, and purchase the flight on Citi Prestige due to their amazing $500 trip delay benefit after only 3 hours delay. Lots of stories out their show that the insurance adjusters via this benefit are very generous on reimbursing just about anything, and the claims process frequently taking 24 hours from claim to reimbursement. Taking that into account, great way to finance one's holiday gift shopping list. @:-)

Slight eye roll at my own post for that one...

This happened to us yesterday. The previous/inbound flight was deplaning at the time of our boarding. GA's did not even make an announcement about "20min" delay until 5min after when boarding was supposed to start. My wife and I have become accustomed to, and almost expect, to play AA's "20min game" with every one of our flights now...

Happened to me last week flying LAX-PHX out of T-6.

First the inbound flight was changed from an A321 doing PHX-LAX, to one dong CLT-PHX.

That inbound wasn't due at the gate until ten minutes after boarding started. At boarding time, radio silence at the gate. Plane shows up at 2:15PM for a 2:30PM departure.

New crew waiting at the gate to board. Obviously not going to go out on time. Departure was not pushed back to show the delay until after we missed our scheduled departure time.

I'm assuming that the delay, on time performance data is coming from the main flight database. Not keeping this updated causes cascading problems you can't plan for. How can the next plane scheduled for that gate get in (or even, get sent to another gate) if no one updates the database with a new departure time? Operations people are making decisions based on bad data in their system because it's not being updated appropriately. What a mess.

I've been tracking AA215 (LAX-GRU) for a few weeks now as I'll be on this flight in a week. It's seemingly delayed more than it's on time.

What's interesting is when I track the travel of the specific aircraft, the delays seem to get worse. While there's no tolerance built into the scheduling as it seems the plane is operating continuous turns, they don't seem to be able to make up any time.

As an example, a 1:45 delay on arrival somehow turned into a 2:45 delay on departure. If they schedule the aircraft with no slack in the system, how can they expect to not have this snowball out of control?

AA 46 strikes again, we are over 2 hours late and counting. Worst of all, heading to EDI and we now have a 6 hour layover instead of the original 2. The other direction and I'd be due a check, thanks Doug and co.

Oh, BTW, no PDB!

Going from CLt-CRW today, incoming flight gets in at 10 AM, it was a "ferry" no passengers, we are supposed to board at 10:45. They do the boarding announcement etc then 20 mins later say that the security check is not done and they have to wait for that. We stood there over a hour waiting for this BS. Who is responsible for that ? I assume AA is supposed to let whoever does this screen know the plane is there and hustle them over to walk on the plane and perform this BS 5 minute procedure ?

Also of course the AA app/website never displays the correct info., at 11:30 the app said we were in the air, they finally change the timing to depart at 12:05 - at 12:07 we are still waiting to board, so you can't actually leave the gate and hit the AC up, just stand there waiting and waiting and waiting.