Flight Cancellation Conundrum
Why should a flight ever be canceled at the end of the day in an airline hub? After spending a wonderful Friday night in Dulles airport because my flight was canceled for “mechanical reasons,” I started wondering why an airline would do this? Follow my logic here:
- Dulles is a hub for United (yeah, it was them…)
- At the end of the day, most hubs have a small fleet of airplanes tied up at the gate. Dulles was no exception.
- I was scheduled to fly on an Embraer of some sort, and there were several very similar looking Embraers available (whether they were actually similar is another question)
Ok, so my flight had some kind of mechanical trouble (they never tell you what). Now during the day, all the planes are in flight. There’s never a “backup plane” they can just magically pull out of thin air. But at night, all the planes are offline. Why wouldn’t they just take another one and spend the rest of the night fixing the first one for use the next morning?
After witnessing the fiasco that followed, the costs to the airline to actually cancel a flight for mechanical reasons are enormous. Unlike weather cancellations, they actually have to pay for a hotel room, transportation, and food for the displaced passengers. They also have to pay the gate agents overtime to hang around and reschedule everyone’s flights. When this happens at 1:00 AM and the line doesn’t finish until about 3:30 AM, there’s also the issue of irate passengers (the 80 year old man in another line was really feisty) and lost goodwill. Oh, and they also have a plane out of place for the following morning, meaning that they either have to fix the original one and deadhead it later, or else they cancel yet another flight the next day.
I honestly have no answer for this. Maybe there are enormous costs to switch planes? Maybe they aren’t that similar and the flight crew wasn’t rated on any of the other Embraers? Maybe “mechanical reasons” was a convenient cover for something else? Anyone have any ideas for this?
Having had a similar experience with Delta in Atlanta, I wouldn’t rule out plain old incompetence. With airline companies it often seems the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing…
My guess is that the flight crew had overextended their flying hours, or if they did fly in a backup plane, they wouldn’t have the legally needed rest to fly the next day. They would rather screw over one airplane full of people at the end of the day than start a day already behind.
Ben: I sort of agree with you, except I’ll take it a step further. My guess is that between the pilot, ground crew, and gate agents, someone had to have thought of the idea. But then someone else cited Rule XYZ or called ground ops and was told “we can’t do that because of Computer Op Code 345″ and the issue was dropped.
Christi: The flight was end-of-day regardless. It was supposed to go out around 9:30 PM, and I do not believe the plane was scheduled to go anywhere after that. So the crew would have rested anyway. It’s possible, however, that crew rest time set the upper limit on how long the mechanics could work, but that doesn’t answer why they couldn’t have just flown another plane.