Johnlathropa

We are flying DTW-LAS on July 26th in the afternoon. I've read here and elsewhere that NW has had to cancel many flights towards month's end as pilots reach their allocated hours and refuse overtime. How likely is it we will run into a problem ? Are we better off flying out of the DTW hub ? and to a heavily-booked destination ? We are returning from LAS on the 29th ? are we more likely to run into problems then ?

Thanks for your advice ? I appreciate it will be a guesstimate.

lovetotravel06

Sorry to jump in on your thread but I have the same question/s. Concerned about delays as well.

I'm concerned about AM flights on the 26th. EWR-MSP and a IND-MSP flight. Thoughts people? Thanks much in advance!

SchmutzigMSP

Too early to get concerned. Just keep checking your flights daily and if something arises, have a backup plan (i.e. alternate routing first on NW, then on CO/DL) to suggest to an NWA agent.

lovetotravel06

I've been keeping an eye on both of mine. Both on time today by the way. They've been running decent (making the 1.5ish hour connect in MSP) 80% of the time. The other 20% one (or both) are late and miss the connect. Last week (Thursday I think) the EWR was canceled and the IND was close to 2 hours late.

Your suggestion at looking for backups is a good one. The connect in MSP is HUGE. Gotta catch it (both of us)!

norske

I have the same question concerning a flight NEXT month.

Little norske is scheduled to fly NWA IND-MSP-GFK on Aug. 31! The purpose of the trip is to attend a wedding elsewhere in ND on Sept. 1. Aside from not booking the last flight of the day, any suggestions on how to avoid getting stuck?

mdb

Fly another carrier - sorry, but seems the only way to be sure.

SchmutzigMSP

But, as we saw with the NW operational issues in June, there were also other carriers who were posting pretty horrible completion/on-time rates, some even worse than NW. There is no certainty.

Oh, and your response was a little canned as NW is the only airline to serve GFK, so he doesn't have much choice other than, perhaps, to fly into MSP and drive.

remedy

Ditto, with a flight to NRT. I assume the flights to Asia are less affected, but am concerned about my connecting flight from CMH-DTW on August 28.

mesabadad

If you don't catch the mid-afternoon (2:40pm) flight from MSP to GFK you will have to wait for the 9:53pm or 10:20pm departures. These will get you into GFK about midnight after waiting for your luggage. Plan on not getting to sleep until 1am. You can actually drive from MSP to GFK in about 5 hours (depending on the time of day) so you could beat the late night flights in and have a rental car available for the wedding.

You might want to consider flying into FAR (Fargo) which is only 70 miles away. They have alot more flights and airline availability. Depending on where the wedding is, it might even be closer than GFK.

Allanf

Obviously this doesn't apply to norske's situation BUT yesterday JetBlue cancelled 19% of their flights, was on-time 34% and 56% of the flights that did go were delayed 45 minutes or more. NW is looking pretty reliable these days by comparison at 3.6% cancellations (of course that pesky Southwest had under 1% cancellations and Midwest had no cancellations.)

bk42

It's too early to tell if NW has fixed its pilot problems... we'll just have to wait.

norske

Thanks for the advice and suggestions. Little norske is actually too young to rent a car by most car rental standards so driving from MSP, although a viable suggestion for some, is not going to work here.

Flying into FAR could be a consideration if the GFK flight were cancelled, and yes, at present we are planning on the 2:40 flight into GFK for the very reason that mesabadad suggested.

MikeMpls

The mainline narrow-bodies are the planes affected by the pilot shortage; the regional carriers have been flying as scheduled. There is a 9 a.m. MSP-GFK on a CRJ, and there is one connection from IND that arrives in time to catch that flight.

I don't recommnend CRJ's for anyone when there are alternatives, but in this case ....

RobOnLI

Was booked on NW209 today - BOS-DTW-SEA. BOS-DTW went off fine but DTW-SEA got cancelled. Still can't believe they cancelled a fully-loaded flight to SEA.

On the phone with the Plat line for an hour yielded nothing but a flight tomrw at 1220pm. In line for 30 minutes and then talking w/ the service center agent for 45 minutes. We found DTW-LAX-SEA (arriving 130am). They tried three times to get NW to overbook the 730p direct flight to SEA but they wouldn't budge because so many people were affected by the cancellation.

Finally, at the last second, we found DTW-DFW(NW)-SEA(AA). I'm currently sitting in DFW waiting for my flight to SEA. How I loathe AA...but at least I get home.

The killer of it all is that I cancelled my perfectly good, "R" class booked trip on CO for tonight BOS-CLE-SEA so that I could get home in time for a friend's birthday dinner. Obviously missing that now. I will arrive in SEA tonight at the same time the plane from CLE would have arrived. The net affect is I saved $90 because the CO ticket was more expensive - but I'm doing it half in coach.

Oh, and my 100% domestic upgrade percentage died this morning as I missed BOS-DTW. What a week!

Good luck and I hope NW doesn't cancel many more flights. I've got two 757's next week SEA-MSP-LGA.

-RM

emoney1978

Well, my 6:30 AM BOS-DTW on 7/19 *and* my 6:00 AM BOS-MSP-SEA on 7/22 got cancelled (in the latter one, I think it was the MSP-SEA that was cancelled, but I'm not sure).

For the 7/19 flight, I didn't get out of DTW until 3:20 PM and it landed at 7:20 PM. For the 7/22 flight, they originally put me in Y on UA from BOS-LAX and Y on AS from LAX-SEA, but I was able to get NW First BOS-MSP-SEA later in the day.

So I'd say it's not too early to tell if they've fixed their pilot problems... they haven't.