pvn

I can't even remember the last time I had an operational problem at ATL.

KDCAflyer

The last mainline issue I had was an MD88 that went mechanical. Got a new plane in 30 minutes, only a short delay overall with padding.

RJ ops are often a mess, but have gotten better since DL booted ExpressJet.

readywhenyouare

I have also had to wait for flight attendants to arrive several times recently. Why don't they drive them from gate to gate if they are late arriving? If they come into E and need to leave from A then you are talking a good 15-20 minutes for them to get there.

apodo77

hotturnip

On Wed. 6/27 my flight to Brussels was about 1.5 hours late. There weren't really "storms" while I was leaving (around 6); it was raining lightly, but heavily overcast with thick, dark clouds. But just the presence of that unsettled weather caused a huge backup, evidently because they could only fly in/out in specific directions due to the clouds/wind. We'd already been lined up for about 20 minutes when the pilot announced there were about 25 planes ahead of us. Got to Brussels about 1.5 hours past schedule (OK by me, since I knew my hotel wouldn't have a room ready anyhow.)

MSPeconomist

Especially when those "awaiting delayed crew" crew move so slowly to their new gate. You would think they would be ashamed of not even pretending to attempt to move briskly for the last 10 yards or so when all the passengers are watching them slowly amble* over to do their job.

*Mosey along is another description, or even dwaddle; some may prefer lollygag as the descriptive term. Whatever you call it, it's painfully frustrating to watch as the further delay means that one will miss the last connection of the night if the rest of the crew don't time out first.

Ordhater

Or better yet, try to keep the crew on the same plane throughout the day, so that one delayed flight doesn't delay three more later in the day (one for plane, one for pilots, and one for flight attendants).

Orange County Commuter

MSPeconomist

In response to post #22 above:

That's the way many RJ crews are scheduled.

BTW, NZ schedules pilots and FAs as a unit, so that the team stays together for an entire multiday trip. On most other carriers, crew are essentially scheduled for each leg individually. Many PMNW TPAC schedules had the purser and a single USA based FA "chaser" do a rather extended trip to Asia involving one or more intraAsia RTs from NRT (where local FAs filled the rest of the cabin crew positions), while the remainder of the TPAC FAs did their rest and returned to the USA on the next day they were eligible to fly TPAC.

orca15

I'm in ATL twice a week. Only once (that I remember) in the last six months I had to wait 10 minutes for a plane to exit the gate due to a recently lifted ground stop. Otherwise - zero of the type of issues OP cites. So that's something like 1 out of 50. Clearly we are on opposite ends of some probability distribution.

SOBE ER DOC

ATL is the busiest airport in the world. DL alone has over 1,000 flights a day. Of course it's going to be a bit rough when weather hits during evening rush. That said, I fly from ORD and through CLT a lot and I can assure you that they are not better. And, in the case of AA, they just wind up cancelling a boat load of flights on the regional feeders to get back on track faster. Personally, I'd rather endure the delay and complete my flights than fuss with cancellations that may leave me stranded.

Jon_R

RobertS975

The airport was essentially shut down for arrivals early Weds afternoon with severe storms overlying the western approach areas. There were ongoing departures to the east. I watched Flightaware for close to an hour... aircraft circling in all quadrants and eventually many flights diverted to Birmingham, Augusta and Huntsville. Eventually, flights approaching from the west could fly a good hundred miles to the southeast where they could hook around the line of storms and make their way back towards ATL.

ND76

I was trying to get home STL-ATL-IAD Thursday night; I was going to misconnect on the last flight of the night, so I was able to get the DM desk to put me on a flight leaving STL at 1615; unfortunately, it never left ATL until almost 2100. What I ended up doing, as I didn't feel like staying at the client's home or in an airport hotel last night, was working on my MQMs, flying STL-SLC-JFK-IAD, arriving at Dulles at 0930 Friday morning.

What appeared to be going on at ATL was a massive line of thunderstorms moved into the Atlanta area, and then stopped moving, becoming stationary for a few hours.

At STL, as the departure time for the ATL flight kept getting pushed back and back and back, my client and I were eating dinner at Lombardo's restaurant in the Drury Inn across I-70 from Lambert Field, and we watched an impressive thunderstorm come in from the northwest. While this was going on I got rebooked on the westbound itinerary I described above. He dropped me off at the terminal around 1800; there was intermittent heavy rain, but also local weather radar depicted a tornado, and there was extremely impressive lightning in the area. The STL airport authority closed the ramp, as their policy is not to let workers out on the ramp if lightning is within 3 miles of the airport. Our inbound flight from SLC was left to sit on the tarmac maybe 50 feet from the jetbridge until the ramp was finally opened around 1930.

It was hell on wheels last night; I did manage to score the last upgrade seat on the STL-SLC, but was #3 for 0 seats on the JFK flight (I originally was booked on one of the two SLC-ATL redeyes, but that plane was hours late leaving ATL, and I would not have made my ATL-IAD connection at 0725 Friday morning). What a mess.

Fly_Delta_Jets

Delta has a service called Crew Van in most hubs that does exactly this: transport pilots/FAs with quick connections to their next gate. However, there's a limited supply of crew vans, so obviously not every crew with a short connection will be lucky enough to get one.

Delta does this during IROPs. Crew (pilots/FAs) are kept on the same aircraft as the day progresses to minimize crew connections and ensure there's a crew with the aircraft.