MrRob

Not a good look for AA. Have they made any sort of statement? I doubt they will. More likely stay quiet and hope if fades into the news cycle.

SJOGuy

Thank you. No one was "stranded" anywhere.

I doubt very much it happened exactly this way. I bet other options were presented, none of which was acceptable to the group. One of the chaperones likely said that they needed to get to their destination that night. The possibility of a refund was then brought up, but I can't believe the AAgent said "The flight is cancelled. We're refunding all your fares" right out of the box.

Kudos to DL for coming through here, but I'm not willing to bash AA for the way it handled the situation.

wrp96

Delta runs an extensive charter operation. It is possible that they were able to pull this CRJ from that in order to pull this off. No matter how they did it though, it was a smart decision on their part.

With all the Max issues, AA may not have had an available plane to pull. Or it could just be yet another in a line of poorly thought out decisions on their part. Either way DL for the win.

AndyAA

More importantly, as this essentially was a reroute on another carrier, would the schoolchildren be eligible for ORC over this incident from AA?

jayer

OK I'll take a guess not that far different than what these two posts suggest.

The week before the flight was horrible weather almost everywhere, but worse for aviation at DFW than most anywhere else. It sucked to be a dispatcher at AA.

I'm going to guess somebody at Delta saw an opportunity to load up a displaced airplane of about the right size that needed to go east anyway, and had the initiative to suggest an impromptu charter made a better load factor than a deadhead repositioning flight. But to do that takes individual initiative and a kind of once-common culture that mostly been lost.

Gig103

The trip was rescued, no thanks to AA.

JDiver

If AA arranged the reroute, yes. If Delta did this on their own, technically, no.

And if Delta did arrange this separately, I hope someone contacts AA because walking away from the booking without notifying AA and getting assent the return is apt to be cancelled. And then what?

caburrito

Exactly what would you have done if no photo was inserted??

CPRich

Sunday. That's a generic stock photo of a Delta airplane. Video and photos of kids outside show current weather.

ATLflyer2017

I'm sure as an agent, you wouldn't really know what else to do, other than refunding the money...how the heck are you going to find 41 open seats on a flight? It is impossible. I don't blame AA for not trying to find another plane, that rarely happens. They weren't trying to find the cheapest way out, I'm sure it's very daunting to try and rebook 41 people in addition to coordinating how many chaperons are with each "set" of kids. It's great that Delta stepped in to save the day, and I don't even think they'd do it just for the publicity because Delta is just generally a wonderful caring company.

I understand that people seem to really want to bash AA but they do what every airline does when there's a delay/cancellation, either refund money or rebook (which would be impossible without chartering an aircraft). That is a risk of group travel, where you often have to book right when the schedule is released in order to get that many people seats.

pinniped

Spent less time questioning the veracity of the story.

And less time even now wondering why they even bothered to go find the unrelated photo. It's not like the photo added anything to the story, other than creating questions as to why it was there at all. Avgeeks immediately know it's wrong and non-avgeeks don't care about the exact aircraft at all.

dll

Witnessed something similar in SLC a couple of months back. I was scheduled on DL SLC-LAX on an A321, set to go out 100% full in the middle of spring break. The aircraft went mechanical as we were boarding and they had to cancel the flight. I overheard a gate agent say that out of 192 seats on the plane, 80+ were connecting through to Hawaii, many in groups of 3-4 travelers. As they set about rebooking guests they realized they could not get most of them to Hawaii for several days (spring break and very full flights all around).

I ended up finding a spare seat 4 hours later on a different DL flight, and then later saw they scrambled a CR9 special section flight to LAX. I went to that gate to inquire if I could get on the flight and they attempted, but said they were giving first priority to those 80-some folks connecting to Hawaii. In the end, they got most Hawaii passengers to LAX and held Hawaii-bound flights on the ground around an hour to accommodate them. I thought it was incredibly resourceful and tells me they have a strong empowerment culture. I was really impressed with their speed and ingenuity.

ijgordon

I think it’s quite clear that DL’s operations are >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> AA’s operations, that’s my takeaway. (Not that I didn’t already know ) I mean AA can’t even get two checked bags from one plane to another 15 gates apart at DFW in nearly 90 minutes.

GetSetJetSet

I don't see the problem here. Flights get cancelled, it happens. Who cares that it was 41 school children going on a field trip and not just any 41 people that needed to get to their destination city that day. I see no problem with what AA did. DL obviously wanted some good PR and got it.

DeepUnderground

These trips were definitely happening when I was in middle school 25 years ago. My brother went to DC from Arizona.