Crazy Headwinds
 

Whats going on with the headwinds this week? All flights from EWR to west coast are pretty much projected to arrive 50 mins late. Been like this all week and again today. Saw a EWR-SNA flight on Thursday that before they even left it was projected to land an hour and 10 mins late. Is there a site out there to check what the headwinds are?

I just drove from CT down to EWR, waiting my late flight (inbound late from DFW). Winds were pretty bad, car definitely got tossed a bit. Lot of the RJ flights are cancelled.

Remember, too, that CO uses a very optimistic operating philosophy, and as a result, there's not much slack or padding in CO's system. So, if there's a longer-than-normal flight time, CO is less likely to be able to absorb it.

On the other hand
 

It works great heading eastbound, as my UA LAX-JFK flight got in about 60 minutes early on Thursday night... :cool:


SunLover

Just landed in EWR, winds gusting to 45 this morning. Pack your patience and some Dramamine it's pretty rough flying in today.

Except when you get "Ahhh, folks, we're a little early so the ground crew weren't expecting us. We'll be waiting here until the gate clears and we get ground crew please remain seated."

YYZ was projected for 100km/h gust last night.... And woke me up a few time.

Wirelessly posted (BlackBerry9630/5.0.0.591 Profile/MIDP-2.1 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 VendorID/105)

Winds on the ground have almost zero bearing on the flight times. The jet stream 30000 feet up is a whole different weather system. I've gone TATL 3x in the past 10 days and the jet stream is pretty strong. I'm flying west again tonight and expect that it will be a bit longer than originally expected, though I do have the slight advantage of starting farther south so the impact should be lower.

As for CO running a more optimistic schedule I haven't seen much evidence of less schedule padding or tighter turns than the other airlines. I'm pretty sure they even block the westbounds longer in the winter to account for it to some extent. And with many planes doing turns and "getting back" the time after a delayed outbound the overall impact on downline flights should be pretty minimal. Of course, if you have some evidence to support the claim I'd love to see it.

My LHR-EWR flight on Thursday clocked in at nearly 7.5 hours. Thank god for bloody marys, percocet and lie-flat BF seats.

Check out CO's block times for transcons vs. UA's.

Compare EWR-SFO to JFK-SFO for example, and you'll see that UA's block times have more padding.

Now of course you may say that's apples to oranges because ground delays or other issues at JFK may differ than CO's.

Then, compare say EWR-SFO on CO to say IAD-SFO on UA. You'll see the block times are very similar, which is interesting, since IAD is not capacity constrained like EWR is, so you'd expect little to no ground delays at IAD. Plus the flight out of IAD is shorter.

Also, look at some of the Euro turns you see on CO vs. UA. Take GVA for example -- EWR-GVA-EWR sits for 95 minutes in GVA. UA's IAD-GVA-IAD sits for 4 hours. Assuming it takes about 45 minutes to board, say 20-25 minutes to offload, and then you need time to clean and cater, that really doesn't leave CO much cushion for problems on a flight like that.

Last night, IAD-GVA took a delay of over 3 hours. The return left 30 minutes late as a result and is due in on time, despite the headwinds.

Finally, look at CO's crew bases (hubs only) vs. UA, DL, and AA, which have crew bases in significant outstations or regions. This gives those carriers a lot more ability to recover in case of a time-out or delay issue, while CO may need to hold for crew to arrive or reposition new crew to recover from an issue.

I think it's this sort of padding and slack in the system which is why UA outperforms CO in on time performance, despite CO's newer feet advantage.

Slack must extend to catering too - my 3 hour delay is growing longer due to the need to be "sequenced in for catering". I'd think a heavily delayed flight would jump to top of queue, but I guess not.

You're on CO, right?

CO basically just breaks down when things don't go perfectly. They probably have their catering folks working full steam, that the extra load of one flight just kills them.

http://aviationweather.gov/adds/winds/ will show you the forecast for winds aloft (Z time). Just select what altitude you want displayed. FL360 should work for general SA.

Dude you're in Geneva...just enjoy the beautiful Swiss Alps and have a bier...

Indeed. Some years ago, my LAX-EWR flight on CO arrived an hour early. :cool:

Then we had to wait on the tarmac for an hour for a gate to open up.....:(