bigwings8

Today I flew out of IAH, in the middle of hurricane Harvey. I did eventually escape the airport, but many flights were cancelled or many hours delayed. Let's talk about how miserable United's operations architecture is for handling anything other than bright clear skies:

For a plane to leave an airport, it needs a crew (captain, copilot, crew of ~5 flight attendants--domestically). I ran around the airport from 8:30-10:00am, asking the gate agent at every viable gate what was happening at that gate. I wanted to get to SFO, so I treated any flight to LAS, LAX, SFO, ORD, EWR, DEN as viable. I even asked some PHL, DCA, HNL departures (I wouldn't mine a few more miles).

In most cases, I found that the gate agents didn't have all the info they should have (where is incoming plane, where is incoming crew), or that they had information that hadn't even been applied to the estimated departure time!


Here are some of the problems:
1) United is not at all transparent with its information, neither to passengers, nor to gate agents. One flight still showed estimated departure in an hour, after the incoming plane was diverted to Dallas. That flight was eventually cancelled. The gate agent told me "I have no idea where the plane is." She didn't find it until *I* started looking on flight aware for tracking..then she pulled up her own flight tracker monitor and said "Ah, I see it was diverted to Dallas".

2) Gate agents (and reservations) often don't have an idea about where their crew or plane is coming from. They're OK at tracking planes, but when I ask "where is the crew coming from...has anyone talked to them?" You get answers like "I have no idea." Either the crew is en route on another plane, or the crew is driving to the airport from the city to start their day. It's inexcusable that that information isn't available.

If the crew won't make it because roads are flooded in Houston, they should know because the crew should have called in. If the crew is stranded in FLL because the plane didn't take off, they should know that too.


3) No intelligent consideration of information. Here's the ideal case: Crews are tracked, planes are tracked, and the "staffing" of a given route can be updated in real time.

Say you have two flights (A, B) scheduled to fly to ORD from IAH. Only one plane is on the ground. The other plane is en route or delayed at another airport. Half of crew A and half of crew B are present. Both flights are only half full. Choose one of the planes and mix the crew and fly one of the routes. United can't do this because
- it doesn't track crew very well (certainly not to any extent that the gate agents or reservation agents know)
- it doesn't handle real-time "rerouting" of crew ... yes if you split the crew, then you have to figure out what to do with them in ORD. But you would have had to do that anyway.

Instead, United would let both flights be cancelled or delayed indefinitely, when it would have been perfectly possible to fly at least one plane.

--

So what did I do? I asked every gate "do you have a plane? do you have a crew"...no..."well where is the crew?". I finally found a gate that had a gate and a crew. [It actually turned out to be the first flight out...I did pick the best plane .] The pilot was awesome: he came out of the plane and was like "line up the passengers to board so that when the ground stop clears [there was massive lightning preventing anyone from working the ramp], we'll be boarded and ready to go". He'd been watching radar and expected to get clearance to go. That sort of foresight and planning is needed everywhere!

I guarantee that there were a ton of PAX around the airport who waited another 3 hours to fly to SFO on some other half full planes. I bet there are even more PAX who didn't make it onto any plane...PAX going to LAX, LAS, DEN, etc would all have been better served by being routed onto the flight I got onto and then flying onto their destinations than waiting at IAH until their flights were cancelled.

--

Arguably, this is a relatively rare circumstance, but how well does United handle even the occasional IRROP? And when things are really bad with storms, etc, United should be prepared to handle it as best as it can.


-- How to do it? --
United should be building a much better real-time routing system. Flight attendants should have an app that allows them to accept last minute "reroutes" onto another flight. United would see an opportunity to shift crew around and the crew would be asked to accept the new routing.

United reservations and gate agents need to actually be realistic...if the plane hasn't taken off from the origin and you don't have a crew, then the modest "half hour delay" is idiotic. I realize that this isn't the gate agents' faults...but rather the fact that the system is unintelligent.

When I went to customer service, or called 1Kvoice, or spoke to gate agent, every one of them should have been able to say "you should take flight X because crew and plane are here. After that, your next best bet is flight Y because the plane is here and the crew is enroute on flight Z scheduled to land in 40 min". In reality, customer service and the 1Kvoice team had no idea where plane or crew was. And gate agents knew only where the plane was and a binary "crew is/is not here".

Alas.

Bear96

LOL. You are surprised / disappointed that things are chaotic in the middle of the strongest storm to hit the country in a dozen years?

I would be thankful just for that. That they are operating at all is pretty impressive by itself. It shows they must be doing something right.

FlyngSvyr

There is WAY more information than you or I are privy to being taken into account for the IRROPS situation going on in IAH right now. The OPS center is making decisions in real time based on airport conditions across the network, flight schedules as well as staffing situations. These can change which airframe & crews are going to fly which flights. They also have to make these decisions forecasting flights 1-3 days in the future to try and keep the whole network from getting out of wack like happened to Delta earlier this year.

All of these decisions are being aided with software to help them along the way. I don't know that it is state of the art, but far from being in the "stone age".

I think it is unrealistic for GA's to have the information that OPS is working with & definitely unrealistic for the flying public to have access to this information. I appreciate your frustration but you had the chance to take advantage of the weather waiver. Now you are just going to have to role with the flow.

JVPhoto

I feel your frantic running around was doing more harm than good my making agents waste time on you than the tasks they most likely needed to get done.

Have you put in a job application to the UA ops team?

mduell

I get the impression you don't understand the complexity of the problem, especially given your excitement for local optimizations without considering global implications.

Complicating things at a hub is possibility of swaps; you can go from having "your" airplane, flight crew, and/or cabin crew being hours away to all being on site already, or vice-versa. That fluid situation is a good reason they don't provide transparency to the gate agents, pax, or anyone outside of UA ops on what the current state of all those resources is.

physioprof

This nails it. [Unduly personalized discussion edited as not allowed per FT Rule 12.]

docbert

The fact that an inbound flight has been diverted does not mean that your flight will not still leave on time - especially at a hub. To the very point you're making, UA *does* swap planes and crew all the time, so once your inbound has been diverted they could potentially swap in a different plane for it. If they were to immediately post a 2 hour delay due to the inbound being diverted, and then do a swap so it's only 30 mins delayed, then you end up with people missing the flight due to them thinking it's 2 hours delayed.


Gate agents aren't crew schedulers. They do have visibility into where the crew are coming from (which is not to say that they will tell you - that's a different question all together!) but during an event like this even that is massively in flux so it's not always going to be accurate, and even when it is accurate it's obviously likely to change by the minute.

The people who's job it is to schedule the crew will absolutely know this. That is not the GA's job.


Sorry, but you're talking about things you clearly know nothing about. UA tracks crew in great detail. The fact that reservation agents don't know crew schedules is completely irrelevant.


Again, how do you know this? I've definitely experienced cases where they have rerouted crew. Remember, there's a LOT to keep in mind here - everything from duty hours to specific types of planes that the crew go staff (any FA can't just go on any plane, and that's even more true with pilots), where the crew needs to be for their next flight, to when they need to get to their home location, etc.

So in addition to everything else there was a ground-stop in effect? And you don't think that will have a serious impact on their ability to plan things?

This has absolutely nothing to do with reservations, but even ignoring that, you are not taking into account the possibilities of an aircraft swap.

Remember, UA has more than just one airport. In addition to worrying about the flights to/from IAH (and other affected airports) they are also moving crew and aircraft around their network in order to handle other flights that were due to be operated by the crew/aircraft that are now stuck in IAH. With 5-6,000 flights per day, this is a massively complex operation, and something where there is no "perfect" solution.

[Unduly personalized discussion edited by Moderator per FT Rule 12.]

Often1

I can't imagine anything less important than looping GA's into the decision and information loop in the face of a Cat 4 storm. It is more information than they require to do their jobs and all it does is frustrate passengers who rely on information which is 100% accurate in the moment, but not the next moment.

Take one miniscule example from your rant, e.g., the flight showing as departing in one hour when the inbound was cancelled. While the outbound may eventually have been cancelled, in the moment, you can bet that UA's Ops Center was looking to see whether there was a way to operate that flight with another aircraft and crew. Apparently there was not or there was but other considerations such as the weather made that inadviseable.

For what it is worth, this sort of substtitution occurs all the time, particularly at major hubs.

Bottom line here is I wonder how many other passengers are stranded at IAH as the result of 20-30 or more of them being bothered by a frantic person bugging them for information they neither have nor need.

While UA has many flaws, it does a good job on this sort of thing and makes full use of its automated systems to keep the entire system moving and identify ways to do so.

[Unduly personalized text edited by Moderator, per FT Rule 12.]

fightingsiouxatc

Let me tell you it is SO much more complex than this. The "simplicity" you're looking for actually involves way more than just the gate agent. Based on your complaints, here's how many people are involved in the issues you encountered:

1. gate agent
2. pilot scheduling
3. inflight scheduling
4. aircraft routing
5. dispatcher
6. load planning
7. weather department
8. ATC department
9. CIRC (customer IROPS)
10. Operations manger (fleet specific)
11. SOC (station operations)

That's just to name a few of the departments involved in decisions based on your flight. I understand it can be frustrating to not have all the information, but when the storm of the decade is hitting the airport, it's hard to demand answers from the gate agent when they have a million things going on. As for knowing where the crew is for a flight: when both pilots AND flight attendants are either flooded into their homes or unable to commute into base due to THEIR flights being canceled, you can't expect the gate agent to know where they're all that...that's just impossible.

Ocn Vw 1K

Members, several recent posts have had to be edited because they have violated this key part of FT Rule 12:

"If you have a difference of opinion with another member, challenge the idea — NOT the person. Getting personal with another member is not allowed. Personal attacks, insults, baiting and flaming will not be tolerated."

Let's stay with the topic and what would be the best ways of providing flight and crew availability/timeliness information in a storm situation; and without disputing with members, personally, based on how they would hypothetically, or otherwise, do their own day-to-day jobs.

Thanks, Ocn Vw 1K, Moderator.

LarryJ

There's been a lot of talk, these past few years, about self driving cars and artificial intelligence replacing pilots in the cockpit. I'd like to see this A.I. technology applied to the problem that the OP describes.

When there are disruptions you end up with a lot of broken pieces strewn around the system. Pilots here, flight attendants there, airplanes somewhere else, and available gates? Where have the available gates gone? Then you add in chaotic and constantly changing ATC ground stops and ground delay programs and diversions, crew legalities, aircraft routings for required maintenance, etc. Oh, and somebody track the passenger connections to make sure we make and many as possible to avoid a backup later.

Putting all those broken pieces back together in an optimized fashion is a very complex process that currently involves many different departments in both Chicago and the local hub. I think this would be the perfect application for the burgeoning A.I. technology. I'm no expert but I don't think the tech is ready yet for the challenge. If it were, some airline, somewhere in the world, would be doing it by now, wouldn't they? Hopefully it will be ready soon.

One point from the OP. Us crews don't get to choose if we will accept a changed assignment. If we are fit for duty (i.e. not fatigued), we go where they tell us to go until we timeout and such schedule changes are routine in situations such as this (and those much less severe). The problem becomes notification. We can get ACARS notifications in flight and alerts, emails, and voicemails on our phones but it takes time for the word to be received and confirmed.

I don't know what specific information the gates agents have but, at hubs, they can and do call their zone controller who does have all of this information and is the one who is posting the revised departure times. With many thousands of agents around the system it's not surprising that some are more proactive than others. The SOC (at each hub) and the NOC (in Chicago) are quite impressive facilities with extensive technology, automation, and communication capabilities. There are a number of YouTube videos which show how these centers work at United and many other airlines.

SeaHawg

Reminds me of the storm scene in "The Devil Wears Prada."

I experience this at my business - If only my customers understood my processes like I understand them....

bigwings8

I appreciate the wealth of responses! I'm not saying that this isn't an immensely complex issue or that UA doesn't already have a complex system in place. I'm saying their system is suboptimal, and among its suboptimalities is an overobfuscation of information. I also recognize that this sort of hurricane system will place the greatest amount of stress on the system. UA probably handles one or two problems well (substitution of extra aircraft or slight adjustment to crew).

The question I was trying to answer at the airport was "what plane has the highest probability of getting me out of Houston earliest". You all point out that UA does sometimes substitute aircraft or crews. I appreciate that. But Houston did not have extra aircraft or extra crew today. The most likely flight to make it out was the flight with crew and plane ready to go, waiting for ground stop to clear.

There were only a couple flights like that today. I wanted reservations or customer service to be able to point me to that one flight, but they couldn't. I had to find out that information for myself by asking gate agents.

And I was right! I picked by far the best flight for my situation after making my way through the entire C and E terminals. I flew out *only* because I found the best plane to get on. On my flight I actually looked through every other one of the flights that might have been viable for me, and there was maybe one. It left hours later. I got on the best one because I asked the right questions. Other people flying to SFO should also have been directed to that earlier flight. It had a plane and crew. It was the most likely to depart. And the plane was empty. I had a full E+ row to myself, after downgrading from paid first to get a seat. UA did other PAX a disservice by not putting them on the most-likely-to-depart aircraft.

I'm saying it shouldn't have been that hard, that I had to find out everything for myself. UA's estimates of plane departure times way underestimate delays. It's unacceptable to push the delay back half an hour every half hour. Now maybe UA should say "true expected time X, but you might have to be here at Y or you'll miss flight" and passengers could take the risk. But I guarantee some people wouldn't have driven to the airport in the hurricane if UA had been truthful about crew and flight delays.

If the probability of departure at 11am is 20%, estimated departure should not show 11am. It should show 3pm. Most airlines have very little regard for passenger time in the airport (vs passenger time in the skies).


--

Re. gate agents:
I'm not suggesting that gate agents make decisions, only that they have greater visibility into what's going on. That should include
- where is the scheduled plane
- where is the scheduled crew
- is there a backup plane ops is considering
- is there a backup crew ops is considering
- what is the probability this plane leaves at all today

Ops has info like this but it's hidden.

Also, I was not wasting gate agent time: the gate agents were doing nothing but standing around. They had no planes, no crews, or were missing both. Many were bored and playing on their cell phones. I was just asking "is your plane here? is your crew here? no? well where are they all coming from?"

Most gate agents *could not* answer the question "where is your crew coming from". Maybe they didn't want to, but I chatted and got friendly with quite a few. Most really seemed to be unable to access that information. But you should be able to know either "the crew is stuck in Houston in traffic / flooding" vs "the crew is in airport" vs "the crew is scheduled to come in on flight X".

--

Also I am not advocating local optimizations! I am advocating a system with complete awareness of what's going on and the ability to rapidly notify those employees / crew involved. In almost every case it's better to have 1 plane and 1 crew make it to a destination than have neither crew or plane make it to the destination. You will have served at least half the passengers (maybe more if both planes are near empty, which they were), and you'll have at least one aircraft and a few crew in the correct next place. I understand that there is a small percentage of edge cases where this might not be true, but in the majority of cases, it works.

In today's case, with mostly half empty planes, (IMO) UA should have been consolidating people onto the flights most likely to make it to their destinations. If there were 4 flights to EWR and all were delayed (some without crew, some without plane), UA should have focused on getting as many people onto the earliest, most-likely-to-depart flight. I did not observe this (and it certainly didn't happen for me).

Reservations just looks at "estimated departure times" and "total delay" to tell you "well this one is next to depart" when it's clearly less likely to depart than the flight with plane and crew in hand. In heavily delayed situations, estimated departure times are absolute garbage.

rch4u

"Stone age" now simply means "suboptimal," really? Also, how did you know "Houston did not have extra aircraft or extra crew today?" You had access to all of that information?

kale73

If true, that would indicate prudence on the part of Untied's operations planners. Had Harvey taken a turn to the north before landfall (unlikely, but hurricanes are notoriously unpredictable) United may have been stuck with several billion dollars worth of equipment on the ground. It's SOP for airlines (and air forces) to move their planes out of the path of a hurricane.