Travel Waiver: New York City Severe Weather (August 18, 2017)
 

Airports:Rebook by August 21, 2017.

Waiver: https://www.united.com/CMS/en-US/tra...eptionPolicies

David

What's going on with east coast flights today?
 

Been sitting at ORD for a DCA flight delayed 4 hours for air traffic control conditions -- all other DCA flights being delayed for the same reason, along with flights to LGA and other east coast locations. And yet AA flights to DCA and LGA are leaving on time or with minor delays. What's going on here?

On the DL board people reported a LGA groundstop earlier today plus a Washington Center groundstop which affected anyone flying through that airspace. All due to weather.

There are travel advisories and waivers for several NE airports today on the UA site

From the FAA website...

And since you're at ORD...

Your first stop when you see delays is the FAA Delay map


http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/membe...e15904-faa.jpg

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/unite...18-2017-a.html

And earlier, there were issues with routes through ZBW:

Attachment 38179

ETA: Now it just shows ground stops for PHL and ORD:

Attachment 38180

I just got home 15 minutes ago, flew from IAD-CHS
FA said we had 23 misconnects 10 from PHL and 13 from EWR who missed the plane to CHS


Follow on flight from CHS-IAD was delayed 1 hour before we even landed due to storms in/around Dulles

Flew out of EWR this morning (on AA). We were delayed pushing back because of EWR being EWR, but then there was a short ground stop right after we pushed back. Captain said he thought we were going to sit for an hour, but it only ended up being ~10 minutes. Everyone on the plane was freaking out because almost every person was connecting at CLT.

So far no additional airports added to waiver.

However if you are flying around that region, things are getting challenging - see UA511's flight path today.

David

I certainly appreciate everyone's comments on the weather, ground stops, etc. That said -- and obviously every airline runs its business and utilizes its resources differently -- its odd that every American flight ORD-DCA today has departed, most arriving DCA less than 30 minutes late, while no UA flight since the 10am has departed (even though many of the planes have been sitting at gates at ORD most of the day).

There is also the issue of resource availability -- aircraft and crews -- which impact airlines in different ways due to different hub structure and different domiciles.

Last week there were different weather issues and folks on AA forum were asking why UA was flying but AA wasn't.

The operations planners are attempting to optimize the system and not a particular route. And in some cases given the resources availability it leads to these anomalies (but if we are the anomaly, we care). For the year UA's operational performance is significantly better the AA's (which has been among the worst for the majors for some time).

UPDATE: IAD, DCA and BWI are now experience gate holds and significant delays per FAA.

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/membe...e15905-faa.jpg

Observations from the evening at EWR as a line of storms rolled through around 6pm.

I was on the 815pm EWR-SFO which had an inbound that was due in around 7:15 (was worried that would divert).

Interestung enough they zeroed out the flight for revenue sales and blocked about 8 seats in business the day before when the waiver was announced. It had been a wide open flight that was R9 last weekend and lots of empty economy seats. Wonder if they did that to leave room for misconnects.

The 7:45pm departure had an inbound on the ground before the storm hit.

So I switched to that.

Went mechanical with 25 min delay just before departure but flights were just starting to take off after an hour ground stop.

Ended up needing a new aircraft and took a 4 hour delay.

Original 8:15 left only about 45 min late.

Lesson learned there.

UA wise they now text you your boarding pass is a $10 food voucher and make announcements in the concourse with the special rebooking hotline.

UA C90 club is now 1/3 under construction.

Gate areas were not the refugee camp feel you usually see with this sort of night.

People kept well informed, a lot more flights got out than I remember from past situations like this, and I guess lots of plugs at the OTG style gates keeps people occupied.

That you can be too aggressive / forward leaning in trying to adjust to schedule and IRROPS situations?

I suspect that most FT elites would have jumped and made the same decision ("Bird in hand" is my view).

Were both A/C 752's?

David

They were all 28 J 757s. It was late evening so guess all the 16J were headed to Europe.

My lesson was how much more precise approaches are with the Nextgen ATC systems - what I used to think were clear no land / diverts are sneaking in.