Flight Delay - Advice on seeking compensation?
 

Would you send in a complaint about the following situation?

Was on DL657 from ATL to LAS last night. We were almost 2 hours late leaving ATL and arrived in LAS an hour and a half late (around 12:!5am local time). Aircraft was a 767-400 (N839MH to be exact) and the reason for the delay was the aircraft showed up to the gate late (gate agents, pilots and FA's were all there on time). Now I understand delays happen but this one has peaked my interest and left me a little more frustrated than usual.

After sitting in the gate area for a while I'm starting to wonder where our plane is. I hop on the Flightradar24 app to see if I can find N839MH and I notice she is already in ATL but at a holding pad/maintenance hangar on the north/northwest side of the airport (transponder obviously is on at this point). But the part that got me more frustrated was I looked at the flight history for the aircraft and noticed it had been in ATL since 9pm on September 9th! The aircraft had been sitting in ATL for 2+ days and we were still almost 2 hours late leaving. I'm going to assume it was in ATL for that amount of time due to some sort of maintenance issue. Regardless of the reason it was on the ground for 2+ days, I feel like this delay probably could have been avoided with some better planning on Delta's part.

Am I turning a molehill into a mountain here? What would you do?

OPS

1) Yes. You arrived 90 minutes late. Do you really want to file a complaint over that? I'd save my powder.

2) Next time, I would provide a better thread title - maybe "Delayed 90 minutes due to late arriving plane that was already in Atlanta for two days." :D

Whatever happened, Delta is not going to tell you. Maybe it was a substitution, or maybe the security sweep got done late.(When an aircraft is parked for some period of time, Delta has to do a security sweep before putting it back into service.)

If you really wanted to know, you should have asked at the gate.

If you complain you will get some miles and an apology, but that's all.

Cheers,

David

To answer your last question...yes.

Just because the aircraft was on the ground for a few days does not mean anything. They could have discovered an issue as they prepared to move it to the gate. Could have simply been staffing issues.
In the end, you only arrived 1.5 hrs late which is of course frustrating but I'm sure there are many more factors behind the scenes than just "the plane came in 2 days ago and has been sitting ever since...Delta get it together".

Enjoy your trip and hopefully your return travel is delay free!

Can we be positive the aircraft was indeed sitting in ATL for nearly 3 days and not that the aircraft was operating another flight that wasn't being tracked by FR24/FlightAware, such as a charter/CRAF flight for the Dept of Defense, which could have had it arriving late from somewhere?

Or as another poster noted above, could well be an MX issue was identified prior to moving the aircraft to the gate for your flight that wasn't present earlier.

Although frustrating, a 90 minute delay alone is not worth the effort of sending in a complaint. I have found that aircraft that have been sitting awhile seem to have more mechanical delays for whatever reason. Usually for me, the 90 minute delay would be the icing on the cake of a complaint I was going to send in for some other issue. Otherwise its not worth my time.

I am almost positive that any Delta flight will operate with transponder on. Sometimes there are 2 day aircraft maintenance checks, and sometimes there are unscheduled maintenance event troubleshooting where maintenance estimates a ready time, which then gets the aircraft added back to the schedule with a buffer, but maintenance takes a little longer than originally planned.

The transponder will be on for ATC purposes but airlines/operators can request that flights be blocked from flight-tracking apps for privacy and security reasons. I'm not suggesting this was the reason for sure and the MX theory (either scheduled maintenance taking longer than expected or unscheduled maintenance popping up) is the more plausible candidate, but I was simply offering another possibility (that the aircraft was operating some sort of charter that was blocked from any flight tracking app/site).

Out of curiosity , what cabin were you in and did the crew follow FEBO for cabin service? I have this flight coming up and trying to decide where to sit so I can get my cocktail and be on my way to zzzz asap.

Thanks.

In this case, I can definitively tell you that it has not operated flights without a transponder on in the last few days

To add to the growing pile of idle speculations, I'll ask when the OP realized that that reg number was assigned to the flight - maybe it had been a different plane altogether up until 5 mins before he checked and that plane went MX and someone said - hey we got N839MH sitting here... I just gotta change the spark plugs and polish the whitewalls and we can get her out the door. Pencil her in.

Per Flightstats, up until 6:18 pm EDT yesterday this flight was supposed to be operated by N825MH. At that time the plane was switched to N839MH.

https://www.flightstats.com/v2/fligh...tId=1070387289

And then looking at the original tail, N825MH - N825MH was on the ground in SAN for almost 24 hours. Looks like it was supposed to operate DL738 on the 12 Sep, departing at 12:45 PM yesterday, and didn't depart SAN until 7:31 AM this morning, being delayed almost 19 hours: https://flightaware.com/live/flight/...955Z/KSAN/KATL

So for all that, for OP to only encounter a 90 min delay after DL was able to find a suitable sub for the ATL-LAS flight after the originally planned aircraft got stuck in SAN sounds like pretty good operational work by DL, at least in OP's situation. Had to be rough for many of the folks in SAN though - hope all/most could be rebooked to an option that got them to ATL or wherever they needed than this afternoon.

I was sitting in "Comfor+" aka the Premium Select seats so the standard beverage service that comes with C+.

Good info. I could've sworn it was 839MH earlier in the day but apparently it wasn't. Since the late switch happened I'm guessing it took a few hours to get 839MH air worthy and thus took a little longer than expected.

In response to some of the other replies, being late 90 minutes wasn't really the part that frustrated me. Based on the information I had waiting in the gate area (admittedly very limited) it was pointing to Delta dropping the ball and not having the right aircraft ready. Again this was prior to the knowledge that 825MH was the original aircraft.

OPS

Seems like a lot work. Why not just use Flight Status on DL app and look at the inbound flight?

Originally tried that but nothing came up.

OPS