b.schwartz312

Scheduled from BWI - BOS this morning, my SWA flight was cancelled, as were most of the first half of the day's Southwest operations in Boston.

Last night's BWI-BOS flights were cancelled as well. However, Spirit flew from BWI-BOS at the same time.

Additionally, other planes are currently en route to and landing at Logan. Is there some sort of airline preference? Noticed on Flightaware that basically all of the flights currently en route to BOS are operated by Jetblue and Delta. Obviously, they have heavy BOS operations, but wondering if they also get primary preference on landing slots when they are restricted?

Any insight into how this process works would be useful.

milepig

Welcome to Flyer Talk!

Flight scheduling is a complicated thing, and doesn't involve single flights but entire networks of interlinked flights. Just one possible explanation for your cancellation among many is that the flight scheduled to take you from BWI to BOS might have been stuck somewhere and never got to BWI in the first place, or maybe SW needed it to be somewhere else for some reason and scrubbed the BOS flight in favor of going somewhere else.

With each subsequent day of a major weather event the system gets more and more out of sync with many planes not where they need to be.

Airlines approach this different. United has a reputation for canceling flights early, and then sometimes they're criticized for canceling needlessly. Some think that this is partially to control things downstream - if, for example, the have 6 flights scheduled for ORD-EWR and then returning to ORD to later go off somewhere else and EWR is running under capacity control. It can make sense to only send 3 of them - if they get stuck in EWR they still have half those later flights out of ORD covered since the planes never left ORD to begin with.

Some airlines cancel early, others seem to figure it out as they go.

pinniped

I've always wondered how it works when the airport is restricting operations. Does ATC reduce each airline's slots by some amount, or do they decide on individual flights?

And yeah, I've always wondered if some airlines get preferential treatment at certain airports. Then there's ORD, where AA and UA are both big players...

Once the airline itself is canceling flights, I figure they get their mainline flights in and out first and whack the smaller regional jets if they need to. It seems like they usually keep their widebodies moving unless the whole airport is down.

jrl767

there was this thing called a major snowstorm in BOS, Sun night into Mon morning ... as others have indicated, some airlines proactively cancel flights into and out of affected areas

BuildingMyBento

Recently was in T5 at ORD. It's mostly for international flights, though Frontier has both domestic and international from there. Saw flights to Cancún and Harlingen (Texas). Many flights were cancelled that day, but not the HRL (Harlingen) one. I'm guessing it's because of the infrequency of those flights, as well as relatively easiness to travel to other locales, e.g. Cancún.

(It also helped that the HRL flight didn't have tech. issues/Harlingen had no weather issues that day.)