mahka42

Coming in on DL2362...wheels down at 0045, a little later than scheduled but understandable with weather in the northeast. Not acceptable, though, is waiting for a gate for nearly an hour and counting. First we had a plane in the alley ahead of us. Then that plane got assigned our gate. Then the gate we were supposed to take had a plane with a mechanical. Now we have a gate but no rampers or marshals to bring us in. So, it's nearly 0200, pax and flight crew are all antsy, and I can't wait to see what measly SkyDrachmas they throw our way while I'm still sitting on the plane. You can't be number one in New York with this kind of operation.

ND76

I feel your pain here in snowbound northern VA.

What is the weather like at JFK?

mahka42

Overcast, but not even drizzling anymore. ATC issues due to wx, I understand. Ground Ops? Total fail.

Robbyb03

They need to bulldoze all three of those airports and build a copy of Atlanta, off the coast, with high speed rail service to Manhattan!

mot29

I had a similar situation at LAX arriving on an RJ, albeit a big one two weeks ago. Landed to the west on the north side of the airport, taxied around to park on the east side of T6, made two loops around the taxiways east of T8 and finally parked on the west side of T6, about 90 minutes late. Fortunately my connection was 3 hours!

Orange County Commuter

That's the absolute worst part of Delta Operations. Point to point they are fine.

I can't count how many times I have landed and spent an hour while the useless Ground Operations "looked for a gate" (Gee you own EVERY gate in several terminals in Atlanta) and even then either couldn't find anyone to park the plane and run the jetway or "opps the jetway is broken" (have they ever tried preventative maintenance on those things?)

StayingHomeIsBetter

It's because they didn't know you were coming. You caught them unawares.

KevinDTW

Just another day at JFK.

KevinDTW

But then you might miss out on the AirTrain, beautiful Jamaica Station, and the LIRR.

mahka42

I go AirTrain to wonderful Howard Beach and the A train back home...assuming the AirTrain is running and PANYNJ hasn't completely mucked up their shuttle service.

Now that I've had a chance to catch up on sleep a bit and had the good fortune of working from home...after finally getting off the plane, it took another 40+ minutes for bags to arrive. I guess there were a number of late-arriving aircraft due to wx, but I can only guess just one ramp crew unloading all the bags. The carousel (oh, btw, only one of them was working) area looked like a 380 had just unloaded but no, it was just 5 flights worth of people all tired and upset because some people had been waiting for an hour.

Must've been really hard to figure out how to arrange gates and staff when flights that were all three hours or longer were all coming in...

sethb

Apparently not. Ran into that at SFO, too (broken jetway, for several days).

sethb

At least you get 2500 SkyPesos for your bags being late.

airplanegod

That's actually a fantastic idea, never going to happen though.

bennos

The problem is that once WX throws airplanes out of order, the backup can cascade well after the weather clears. (And the weather was very, very bad for a couple of hours during the late afternoon.)

Consider a situation where arrivals are delayed 30 minutes and departures are delayed 90 minutes. (Very common to have asymmetrical delays in the NY area.) You now have a backup of departures that are waiting to leave. Where are they going to go?

There are a finite number of gates, if you leave them at the gate the arrivals can't arrive. There's a finite amount of ramp space. You can't (easily) move them to hard stands. And of course if there are passengers onboard, the 3 hour rule comes in to play, so rather than send a plane out for a delayed departure, perhaps you leave it at the gate and delay boarding. But once you do that, remember how there are a finite number of gates? Where are you going to put the arrivals?

And don't forget not all gates can handle all types of planes.

So, in summary, it's complicated, especially when systems operate near capacity under normal circumstances.

Air Houston

With the fine labor force in NYC I can easily imagine such a project pushing $100 Billion