My friend was flying to LHR last night from JFK on AA. Her 9:30pm flight was delayed due to "mechanical" problems, and they were threatning to cancel it completely. As if that wasn't bad enough, the 7:30pm flight was cancelled, also due to "mechanical" problems. And to top things off, the 11:30pm flt was also cancelled, due to, you guessed it, "mechanical" problems. Making matters even worse was the fact that the Admirals Club now gives 2 drink coupons when you come in. All other drinks must be paid for.

I told my friend that I've never ever had "mechanical" problems on Continental (and it's unlimited drinks at the club.) We agreed thay they were trying to cover something up, like possibly saving the cost of sending out a flight or two and getting everybody on one aircraft. Which led us to what it costs for fuel on a 777 - 7 hour flight. Anyone want to wager a guess (or an exact answer for that matter)?

I think it would have been interesting to call AA and find out what was happening to the return flight. Back in the bad old days of Continental, when they used to play games with passengers in Newark, calling to see what was up with the return flight often got one nearer to the truth. I bet they already had canceled two returns.

I don't have a clue how much a B777 would guzzle on a flight to LHR. I'll guess 125,000 lbs.

I guess the term "mechanical" is pretty broad. They may have just decided that a number of non-critical issues that were flagged should now be addressed. If passengers knew their rights, they must have had to fork over a lot of compensation for the cancellation of the 7:30 p.m. flight; it must have been more expensive on the canceled returned flights, since the EU seems to have stricter regulations about these issues.

According to Expert Flyer, the 6:15pm flight was cancelled. The 8:15pm flight departed ontime. The 9:30 pm flight was delayed due to a change of equipment. The 11:30pm flight was delayed 15 minutes.

So, one mechanical cancellation and one delay due to a mechanical. Sh*t happens.

Greg

I'll double check but I think we're paying around $1.75 - $1.90 a gallon, depending on station. So if anyone wants to research capacity and convert, you'll have a rough estimate.

My brother in law uses mech problems on American to his advantage. He will check for those flight having them and switch his flight to it upon check in. Invariably AA credits him with a minimum of 10K-20K miles, plus the other stuff he gets at the airport

$13,500?

The old, red CO had a history of reliability issues, so the current blue CO tries hard not to cancel flights. I think it's very evident in the company culture.

With that said, CO is a smaller airline than AA, so the impact of cancelling a flight is usually more severe on CO. Not to mention, with fewer flights, CO is less likely to have the available capacity to accommodate everyone without sending them to another airline.

In this case, CO has two (2) flights LGW-EWR, while AA has six (6) flights LHR-JFK. All flights are on 777 aircraft. So as far as non-stops are concerned, AA is 3 times the size of CO. Then if you count connecting passengers who might be able to be rebooked via a different city, CO has 2 more flights to IAH, and one to CLE (if you catch the right day). AA, OTOH, has 5 to ORD, 2 to LAX, 2 to BOS, and 1 to MIA. So AA has more than 3 times the rerouting options than CO for connecting pax.

While the airlines will always deny faked "mechanicals," I do believe they do it, and for a large airline like AA on such a heavy route such as this, they're more likely to be able to get away with it. So in the end, since an AA cancellation would be far less disruptive than a CO one, which is why I think AA is more likely to do it.

Yes... likely they canceled for lack of pax... it's not like they need those 777s downline at the destination cities

I doubt AA fake a mechanical on this one, but there are still grey areas. You know that if one of CO's 777 for EWR-LGW have a mechanical, and that both flights are like 85% full, they will do everything possible to fix the plane and get the flight out, and CO usually has one or two 777s at EWR for standby.

But AA may take a less urgent stand, as channa has explained clearly why.

Hi y'all,

I worked for AA Operations several years ago.
I was never a big AA fan, and once I wasn't employed by them, I defected all my flying to other carriers (originally CO) where I've always maintained Platinum ... so I feel my opinion isn't biased towards AA....

AA doesn't have "fake mechanicals".
I doubt anyone in the industry does. Cancelling a flight (particuarly for an airline with multiple hubs) can create more operational nightmares than it solves. And while your "faked mechanical" flight might have had a light load, as fate would have it, the flight that the plane comes back seems to usually be oversold.

Now ... having said that ....
The plane with the mechanical problem may not be your flight's aircraft.
AA (and I'm sure every carrier) will juggle aircraft assignments once a mechanical has left the airline "short" a plane. And while frequent travellers won't believe this ... airlines actually do this juggling in an attempt to inconvienece as few passengers as possible (I'll contradict myself on this in a minute).

The plane with the "mechanical" might not even be at your departure city.
The simple case being it's still in whatever city it was flying in from. But here's a hypothetical situation which Ops sees everyday...
You're flying today DFW-PHX and your flight gets cancelled due to mechanical.
Where's the broken plane ???
It was the Chicago-Washington National plane that broke down.
That ORD-DCA flight was oversold.
The ORD-Denver flight was only booked 50 pax, so it was cancelled.
From DEN, that plane (which is now going to DCA) was to have flown DEN-DFW-San Antonio-DFW
Obviously, the DEN-DFW flight is cancelled because ORD isn't going to send them the plane.
Logic would have it that the continuation of that flight (DFW-SAT) as well as the SAT-DFW return would also be cancelled. However, lady luck has struck and there's a spare plane at DFW !!
But guess where the crew for those flights are ??
They're in DEN. They overnighted there and was to have started their day today by taking the inbound aircraft from ORD and fly it DEN-DFW-SAT-DFW.
So DFW isn't short a plane, but they are short a crew due to: mechanical
Another issue going on is that due to delayed flights earlier in the month, the crew that's flying the DFW-PHX is running short on their monthly "duty" limit ... to the point that if there's any last minute delay on the DFW-PHX flight, the crew would be "illegal" for their PHX-DFW return. Thus we're running the risk of having a plane stranded in PHX. But you know what ?? That crew has enough duty time to comfortably handle a "SAT turn"
.... so....
Your DFW-PHX flight is cancelled.
The official reason in the computer will say something like: crew/eq dist
Translated: Unable to crew due to equipment distribution
The poor Gate Agents won't know the history of how this situation evolved, but that "equipment distribution" says there was a mechanical somewhere that screwed everything up, so they'll tell you "mechanical"

And we ain't done yet.
The plane that was supposed to go ORD-DEN-DFW-SAT-DFW today was put on that routing becuase it specifically had to be in DFW tonight for its "B-check" (a mechanical checkup that occurs every 3-4 days ... it'sbased on flight hours). Instead, it's going to fly ORD-DCA-ORD-Seattle. SEA isn't equipped to do B checks. Sending the plane on to SEA tonite will leave it illegal to return in the morning. So when it gets back to ORD, it's pulled offline instead to spend the night there. The whole "equipment distribution" game starts again in trying to get the SEA flight out.

But we ain't done yet.
The 3rd shift maintenance crew at ORD ended up with one more B-check to do tonight than what the schedule said they'd have. Come tomorrow morning, ORD ops will be expecting 5 aircraft coming over from the hangar to operate trips leaving in the 6:45am departure bank. But Maintenance calls at 6:00 and says only 4 of them are ready to go, the 5th plane will be brought over at 8:00am. The day hasn't even started yet and we're already feeling the effects of yesterdays mechanical.

Because cancellations have such a "ripple down" effect, the generic rule of thumb is "don't cancel". I can't think of a time (in 7 years at AA Ops) that a flight was cancelled strictly due to low passenger count (I'm not talking about no-ops .. ie: .... in July, scheduling decided that flight #101 will not operate on Dec25 due to anticipated low load). When push comes to shove and we have no choice but to cancel something, many factors will decide which flight cancels; the passenger/freight/mail loads (out & back) being one of them.

Another trick (this is where I contradict myself about inconvienicing as few folks as possible) is the "equipment move-up".
A plane on the 2:00pm departure bank is grounded.
There are no spares until 9:00pm (of the 12 MD-80s coming in to spend the nite, 3 are not coming in for B-checks so are re-assignable)
We can delay the 2:00pmish flight until 9:30 but we don't.
A plane coming in at 3:00 and due out at 4:00 is "moved up" to fly the delayed 2:00
A plane coming in at 4:30 and due out at 5:30 is moved up to fly the delayed 4:00
Etc etc until the 9:00pm "overnighter" departs at 9:30pm as the delayed 8:00pm flight.

While this disrupts a lot of passengers today by an hour or so, when you look at the "ripple effect", it really isn't that bad of a plan. A cancellation affects the operation more than most passengers could ever imagine. Delaying the 2:00pm until 9:30pm also has many issues. For one, that plane probably turns around as a 6pmish arrival back to a hub So those inbound passengers are standed somewhere. And here's DFW at 7pm with 2 planeloads of passengers mulling about due to one plane broken. Whereas delaying several planes thru the day by an hour or so allows a lot of them to make up time before turning around back to a hub (the "spoke" city turns them around as quick as possible instead of having the plane on the ground for an hour and half). They may not get back to the hub "on-time", but will get back in time for most passengers to make their connections.

Having seen "the other side", I wouldn't try to second guess the airline.

Steve

Thanks for that Steve ^

I will also stand here and be a testiment as to AA NOT canceling for light loads. I have been on a 738 where I was THE ONLY PAX on board. Very eerie.. but they took off anyway!

Steve, when I come across them, I always like your trips down memory lane. Just out of curiosity, why did you leave AA?

Back in my UA days, I will also atest to never cancelling a flight solely because of load factor. In fairness, I worked for UAX, and we were paid for every departure.

That said, if we cancelled a flight seemingly because of light loads, somebody's flight was getting cancelled. Period. At ORD, we were also the victim of UA, who saved reduced capacity slots (T storm days) for their own use.

I graduated from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University wanting to be an Airline Pilot when I grew up. Hearing & Blood Pressure problems led to my losing my Flight Medical Certificate so I ended up parking cars for a Valet service under contract w/American Airlines.

It got my foot in the door. I started AA as a Gate Agent. My flight background got me a transfer to Load Control (weight & balance planning). From there I went into Operations which over the years was Ramp Control, Gate (assignment) Planner and a few other various things...all at DFW.

After several years of rotaing back and forth between the gates and ops, I took a management job at System Operations Control (Dispatch office) as a Navigation Database Analyst. That job dealt a lot with the computer ... and I was approached by the company to learn to become programmer.

So off I went to programming school. I ended up becoming the Tech Lead for the Flight Planning System. That position was with AA when I started it, but was then regrouped into Sabre which AA eventually sold. The new Sabre wanted to be a "dot com" and could care less about the mainframe computer, so we were outsourced to EDS. EDS doesn't like to actually do any IT work, they just want to "consult" and send the actual work overseas. The layoffs were almost monthly. Our workgroup was down from 80 prograqmmers to about 15 when I found programming work with another company.

Tho my paycheck stopped saying "AA" 2 years before I left, I always considered myself an AA employee until I resigned from EDS (my employee number and seniority date stayed the same all along). I left 6 months shy of my 20th year.

Steve