spartacus

As shown by the final action, that was deemed to be more of a Mesaba problem with blowing off CO's request to deplane the pax. They were getting ready for the move to DL.

channa

As shown by the fines that were levied, CO/COEx/the ground staff/etc. were all jointly liable.

It was CO's name on the plane, CO selling the flight, CO collecting the revenue, so CO needs to be responsible for making arrangements in these situations and making sure their subcontractors perform.

LarryJ

What exactly do you want them to fix? There are some incremental improvements that can be made in ATC but all of the low-hanging fruit has long since been picked. In most of these situations it is a lack of runway capacity that causes the bottlenecks. ATC improvements can't significantly increase runway utilization rates.

When a hub airport is impacted by severe weather, the airline that operates the hub will be much more severely impacted than the airlines that just operate a few flights in and out.

IIRC, the fine on Mesaba was twice as large as the fines levied on CAL and CEX. IOW, the fine on CAL plus the fine on CEX equaled the fine on Mesaba.

channa

That sounds right.

Though the take-away from this for CO is that pointing a finger at a subcontractor is not appropriate.

sbm12

Yes and no. Runway congestion is part of the problem but so is the in-flight routing systems that restrict traffic to pre-defined routes that are increasingly crowded. A flight from MCO-BOS may have trouble because of weather over IAD due to the legacy route paths. That compounds later in the afternoon when thunderstorms blow through central Florida.

There are plenty of improvements that ATC can realize that will help things out though they are certainly not a silver bullet.

spagiola

From today's New York Times:

See U.S. Set to Expand Role in Protecting Air Travelers

No mention of Smisek's threat, but the article does note that airline's will have to indicate on search results, along with the on-time record of each flight, whether it is cancelled more than 5 percent of the time.

harryhv

Yes, ATC's system of queuing for take-off today seems to use the same system unchanged since the Wright Brothers - line up at the end of the runway and wait for a break in the weather.

With the huge wealth of statistics available, maybe it's time to set up a probability-based system where no aircraft leaves the gate until there's a good chance it will get away.

channa

Which just pushes the tarmac delay to the inbound flight that needs that gate that's now being blocked.

Basically the airlines and airports have no effective way to board and deboard passengers when gates are occupied. Now it's time to figure that part out.

EWR764

With CO's 99%+ completion factor, I doubt there is a single flight systemwide that is canceled more than 5% of the time. As with the rest of this proposal, it sounds great in theory, but will either be difficult to implement or cause more harm than good in practice.

channa

For CO mainline this is probably true. But ExpressJet has a cancellation rate 5x of CO, and some regionals do worse.

One of the lessons learned from this is that the marketing carrier shares some responsibility. So if CO is going to sell ExpressJet flights, it will probably need to comply with the display requirements for them as well.

spagiola

Perhaps so. But will this still be true if CO does in fact start cancelling flights when there is any threat of a delay?

How exactly does informing potential passengers of the reliability (on-time arrival % and cancellation %) of a given flight cause more harm than good? Except to airlines that have poor on-time records and often cancel flights?

sbm12

It isn't all that hard to implement at all. Just like airlines have to report the 10% range of on-time arrival now they'll have to add a flag for frequent cancellations. The data is all there so adding that flag isn't particularly hard. And there isn't much downside to having that information public.

Most of the things required by the DoT/FAA in the new rules are very good for consumers. Better disclosure and requirements of real contact channels and response time lines are good things, for example.

But the 3-hour rule is not.

EWR764

The cancellations would be caused by the 3 hour rule. Under all other circumstances, the flight would run with a delay, but customers would reach their destinations. Only in exceedingly remote cases would any delay reach the level that triggered this highly restrictive regulation. In this case the government is solving a problem that didn't necessarily exist, and in doing so, creates another.

How will the flight's on-time performance be measured? Over the course of an entire year? Same-flight/same-day? Quarterly? There are a multitude of factors that impact a flight's on-time performance that certainly preclude the disclosure of such data from being a panacea.

Will it help? Possibly, for the uneducated traveler. Then again, this customer is probably the least time-sensitive of all.

Same goes for cancellations, where the statistics might be even more useless.

I suppose it will be easy to present this data on the interface with the customer when booking the ticket. However, like the rest of this regulation, it does nothing to address the source of the problem except place even more onerous restrictions on the air carrier.

Unless the objective is to reduce demand for seats at the busiest times of day, which won't happen, this aspect of the plan is entirely illusory.

Given this Secretary's penchant for High Speed Rail (along with the Administration as a whole), perhaps the motive is to kill off demand for shorthaul air travel, since these flights have the highest % of cancellations, so as to drive passengers to the as-yet-nonexistent network of HSR in this country? If so, they are about 25 years too early...

see: http://blogs.wsj.com/middleseat/2010...h-speed-train/

featheroleather

Leave 2 or 3 gates open and availalable just to offload pax, then leave ASAP for other planes to do the same. Of cousrse, if FA's or Pilots are about to go illegal, the airline is loathe to risk them walking off the plane.

sbm12

The farce that the 3-hour rule is continues to grow.

US Air has now applied for an exemption for their operations in Philly because they're going to have to handle the overflow diversions from NYC once all the NYC hubs get exemptions. That's on top of the CO, B6, AA and DL applications in NYC.

So now we're looking at JFK, LGA, EWR and PHL all trying for exemptions. UA @ IAD next?? After all, IAD actually did have a lot of long delays last year.