stampchez

I think this is 6 late flights for me in the last week. It's getting old.

Maybe I just have bad luck.

Big4Flyer

Ouch, 6 in a row? Not sure if we're talking 10-15 minute delays (which they can usually make up for in the air) or 1+ hours which tend to throw your entire day off. I've been pretty lucky lately, but most of mine are quick west-coast flights. Not sure what would cause that many delays since there hasn't been much bad weather from what I've seen, and 6 flights going MX would be quite the statistical anomaly. I recommend staying away the lottery for the next little while

obunewbie17

I think I've had delays on a handful of flights over the past couple of months (I do typically fly in evenings). But if there's an issue in the morning and the plane is coming from the west coast, it's going to slow down the rest of the scheduled route.

Last week I had a flight from MSP to STL. There was a plane swap at LAX that delayed getting into DIA....and then into MSP...and then into STL...and they flat out cancelled the continuation to Dayton after that.

Mr. Vker

I fly a lot of Mid-Atlantic flights. June/July/August I avoid mid-late afternoon flights whenever possible. Regional (sometimes non-regional) thunderstorms cascade and make them late more often than not.

sdsearch

That's one of downsides of Southwest's point to point system. With a hub and spoke system (at the big 3 legacy airlines), many planes are much more likely to spend the day going back forth between one hub and one or two spokes. Only if that hub or those spokes are affected (by weather, etc) can it cascade for later flights on that plane.

But with Southwest running their point-to-point-to-point-to-point planes all around the country 'at random", weather/etc issues in one part of the country can "randomly" appear as delays later in the day in other unrelated parts of the country. If you don't know the route the plane took through the day up to then, you can't figure out whether it came from an area affected by weather/etc or not.

ucdtim17

It is quite annoying to take a west coast hop between two reliable airports (OAK-PDX) on an airline with "west" in the name and have to pay for weather in the east with delays that accumulate as your plane hops around before coming west. Hasn't affected me recently however as planes I'm on aren't starting the day in the east. They seem to be improving, at least for my flights.

acwan93

It seems like Southwest has tried to mitigate this, at least with the intra-California flights, by having some planes only stay within CA and LAS/PHX. Of course, that still leads to delays out of LAX or SFO.

At this point, I've gotten so used to delays between the Bay Area and LA in the evenings that parties on both sides picking me up won't leave for the airport until I actually get onto a plane and tell them which airport I'm going to.

darthbimmer

The problem of weather delays propagating across the entire system affects all airlines. One additional cause of cascading delays that's unique to WN is its short scheduled turn time. They routinely schedule aircraft to depart 45 minutes after arrival. When load factors were lower years ago this was reasonable, especially with WN's industry-leading turn efficiency. But with loads approaching 100% on many flights today it's hopelessly optimistic. Seating passengers after the first ~85% of seats are taken is much slower as overhead bins fill up requiring carry-ons to be checked and passengers take longer to choose from the remaining seats.

rsteinmetz70112

The hub and spoke scheduling typically has more time between departures. The planes tend to arrive in waves to allow for more connections. This also allows time to make up some delays.

Algebralovr

Had a long delay before STL to SEA on May 24, but the captain let us all know that it was due to a mechanical failure and they did a plane swap to avoid cancelation. Two hours late is better than not at all!

On the way home, we ran on time, arriving into STL a few minutes early for the SEA to STL run. Plane was continuing to MCO - on time. I think we arrived in STL about 3pm.

apbailey

Did they ever give you a reason for these delays? The last few delayed flights I've had on Southwest there has been radio silence as to WHY the delay happened. A lot of "thank you for your patience," but no actual information. Maddening.

rove312

I looked here for stories of a major meltdown yesterday, June 14. A few weeks in advance we changed to an earlier connection through BWI, which went well, but we got alerts about our original later connection through MDW, and both flights were delayed 4 hours. I looked at how our upcoming return flights through MDW went last night, and it was similar, with the last leg cancelled. Problem systemwide or with flights touching MDW?

palmetto86

Most of the eastern U.S. was hit by summer t-storm clusters. They caused major delays across all airlines yesterday. I was flying AA and CLT was a mess yesterday.

CDKing

April was my first time in the last 4 attempts to actually get to my destination without having to make alternate transportation plans. That one flight was an evening flight.

sdsearch

Most airlines never give the average flyer the reason for most delays, but they report them. If you use (the paid service) ExpertFlyer, you can usually look up the stated reason (in airline code that you have know how to decipher) for a particular delay. I've seen numerous threads in the AA forum over the years where somebody would ask about the reason for a particular delay (by flight number and date) and then someone would post the info from ExpertFlyer and someone (that person or someone else) would then decode it into plain English.

I don't know if there's a free service to look up flight status notes for Southwest or not, and I don't know if there's a guide out there to decoding such coded notes or not.

To me, that's sort of analagous to how airlines don't even tell the average person whether there's 7 or less seats in a cabin (or in a specific fare code) left for sale, but that information is out there too. See this recent thread: