naxos

I am sure that I am not the only one who has experienced or heard about the incredibly high number of "weather related" delays or cx's reported by the airlines. Almost every day the UAL website mentions severe weather somewhere that results in cx's. I seems as if the delays last for days from one singlr thunderstorm. and the impact is felt nationwide, if you believe the airline's reasons for the delays. I have taken only four leisure trips in the past few months, each to a different place, zurich, tampa, sfo and hartford. Each trip experienced alleged weather related delays that resulted in many unplanned hours at the airport, without compensation, of course. I have been travelling fot many many years and have never had such problems. How can one ascertain whether or not it is the weather that causes the delays? it seems as if the airlines ahve tken this excuse to the extreme. While I would never want a pilot's judment not to fly in bad weather to be questioned, I do question the ripple effect that one storm has on flights one or two days later in places geographically remote.

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l etoile

It is rather difficult to ascertain if weather is the cause of a delay or not. You'd pretty much have to look at satellite photos from the entire route the aircraft will fly and then look at them going back a while as there definitely is a ripple effect (although it shouldn't last for days after).

Your flights can also be effected by weather at airports far from near where you are traveling to. Say you are flying SFO-LAX and there's weather delays at DEN. The LAX-DEN flights are grounded because they can't get into DEN. Now LAX has got planes on the ground tying up gate space and no place to put your flight from SFO. So your flight is delayed on the ground at SFO even though the weather is beautiful at SFO and LAX.

That said, there are definitely some pilot games going on that are increasing the delays. ... If you were the gate agent would you announce that the flight was delayed due to weather or because the pilots who need to be on board to fly a plane from the next airport were sitting in the cockpit of a broken plane and no one could find them? This actually happened, by the way.

magic111

I just got back from a five-day leisure trip to ohio to visit relatives and they tell me that this spring they are having some of the weirdest weather in the midwest. Just after i landed the mother of all storms hit and yet 6 miles away the ground was dry. Coming home we circled ord in a crj for 45 minutes waiting for weather conditions to clear and the subsequent backup and then on the ground after leaving the jetway it took almost 2 hours to takeoff.

richard

There was an article in USA Today a few weeks ago that said that May was the worst month practically that anyone could recall in terms of weather delays. June isn't much better, judging.

Combine it with a booming economy and you get a lot of pax, a lot of flights, a lot of potential problems.

It costs the airlines a lot of money, it's nothing they want obviously.