PaulInTheSky

Experts,

I tried to figure out what happened to my original flight CX379 that was supposed to take off at 00:50 July 3 2017. Flightaward/Fightradar definitely won't show the comments. I am surprised EF doesn't show additional comments on the delay. Any way I can find out how it was delayed?

My CX379 is moved for the one tonight. Hope it will not take off at 4a.m.

1010101

Chinese ATC restrictions. It happens often - China despite its size has only a handful of corridors for civilian aircraft, the rest is military controlled. Once the corridors get full you have to join a queue and in HKG that means not taking off until you are allocated a slot. 4am is unusually bad but its common for the last European flights of the day to take off an hour or two late.

Manchester was actually the last to go last night at 0432

jdtravels

The Manchester flight seems to have been on the chopping block for delayed departure for quite some time now...

QRC3288

I think it has to do with your place in the departure queue and if you make your slot or not. And if going south is a reasonable alternative.

For example, on late night July 3 (July 4am) MAD, FCO and MXP were also 3+ hour delays....but in their case, it appears CX re-rerouted them via the longer and rarer southern route over Thailand / India etc. It's especially uncommon on the westbound flights because it's 1+ hour longer, but happens on occasion for these flights as well as ZRH once in a while. This tells me it was a particularly bad issue over China. So they decided to send those flights south and added a bunch of flying time, but kept holding off on MAN in the event ATC to the north cleared up. Because MAN via the southern route is even less practical given its northern latitude, adding 2+ hours of flying time.

PaulInTheSky

When you can have PEK and CAN ATC, and allow only one aircraft slot for every 20min, there's really nothing CX can do. After we are boarded, we found out it's on slot no.5, so 1.5 hours, and with taxi to the runway, two hours. Made up a little time so arrived 1.5 hours earlier. The MAD flight went south, the FCO flight was diverted back to HKG. I saw PEK ATC to delay both CX and KA flights significantly, so I figured ours would definitely be delayed. I also noticed most flights leaving exactly at around midnight (00:00ish) almost always gets out on time.

Kudos to the professionalism of the flight crew. I just thought things could have been better by deplaning the passengers instead of having them waited. I am in J, so I could sleep better, but feel bad for everybody else in Y. Adding two more hours on the Y seat would be bad.

jdtravels

Any one know whether they keep the lounges open for these (chronically) delayed departures?

1010101

I don't know, i don't think so, as i have been kicked out of The Pier before at 0030 when other flights have been delayed.

Usually they get you onboard on time and then the delays start.

percysmith

I'm not sure whether this applies to CX flights flying over PRC to a non-PRC destination, but:

Q1.1. Air flow control is imposed by the PLAAF, and therefore a military secret. Flight crews are not at liberty to share this info with passengers.

Q4. Doors close determines takeoff priority. Therefore carriers are motivated to achieve earliest doors close time and not open doors even if passengers are almost cooked well done.

gpia

There was another thread on that, indicating so. At least from my experience, The Bridge stayed open past their 0:30 closing time when several EU flights were delayed 1 hour+ a couple of weeks ago.

kaka

Because of bloody pla- i wish trump or kim could liberate the airspace. Omnipr aside, the lounge would not matter cuz those flights would be delayed after boarding like my flight on 1jul and also the many nights around it. Technically this very thread is not the only rant for the same delay. 2 hours delay then take off.

normally they would hold the wing lounge for any delays(so, if ure at gate 6x and its delayed till 2am, you have a dilemma to stay out out the pier for an hour; or stay at wing till 1:15 then walk over cuz the trains stops at 1am... or leave the wing at 0050 and take the last train... and wait at the gait for the 45-60 mins.

FlyPointyEnd

I think only The Wing stays open during those times.

PaulInTheSky

Well, it's not mentioned by the FAs but the captain(ATC, slot whatever number, every slot needs 20 minutes buffer before the next slot comes in). IMHO, the captain gave the enough information to customers so we are like 'OK that's out of CX's control, even though it's midnight to 2 or 3, we understand that'.

I am not sure if your answer to Q4 is entirely correct. The slot and the order that we got was when the ISM paged the captain that we were ready to close the door. In actuality, the door was never physically closed until we got the green light 'Slot 5 you are cleared to go.' There can be other arrangements? I remembered very vividly the door was then closed firm after we were given the green light to go. We were not even in the ramp or something. We were actually right next to the gate with the aircraft door open, waiting until 2:25a.m..

I noticed a couple of things, however:

1. Any CX flights to Europe, through China airspace, leaving at around 23:00-00:05 were usually on time.(LHR, ZRH, CDG) - E.g. You can easily see CX251 didn't get delayed as often/bad as CX255. Any others after that, 00:10 and so, were heavily delayed. Perhaps slots were all gone, and CZ and CA have a lot of flights leaving right around that time?

2. You can have all the midnight flights delayed before boarding or right around the time the captain was signaled the door was ready to close. I talked to F check-in desk when I checked in there 'When do we know whether our midnight Europe flights are on schedule?' I was told that when we don't see sudden messages coming up between 10-11p.m., usually we are ok. In this case, apparently he's wrong, but it's China Airspace we are talking about, so not really much that CX can do anyway.

PS: One thing for sure is that when the MAD or other seasonal Europe midnight flights were gone, even on days where DUS don't operate, you can clearly see the delays of other Europe flights were way less. I guess it's pretty obvious.

sxc

CX251 is a special case. It is one of the flights given special dispensation to land before the heathrow curfew ends. So it is always given priority to depart. Except once the annual quota of early arrivals is used up and then they have to delay the CX251 departure.

G-CIVC

I've also heard that sometimes flights are more prone to delays if there are fewer connections to take care of. On those nights when they are one frame short, they tend to sacrifice the MXP flight because it has the least onward connections. Just something I heard somewhere...

PaulInTheSky

That definitely is taken into consideration. My point being:

HKG-ZRH CX383, pretty clean OTP except one or two delays. That's 00:05
HKG-CDG CX261, slightly worse, a few got delayed to 1ish, definitely caused by China ATC, but overall pretty good and clean OTP

HKG-FRA CX289, A few off, but overall pretty good and clean OTPs. That's 00:35
HKG-LHR CX251, Pretty clean OTP.

HKG-MAD CX315, Messy
HKG-DUS CX379, Messy
HKG-LGW CX343, Messy
HKG-FCO CX293, Messy
HKG-LHR CX255, Messy
HKG-BCN CX293, So far so good, with one big delay.
HKG-MXP CX233, Messy
HKG-TLV CX675, Messy.

The messy ones are usually the last ones going to Europe.