Airplane Nightmares - A few weeks ago I wrote a cover story called "The Cancellator." I spent time at the American Airlines operations center understanding and explaining the hows and whys of flight interruptions. One of the takeaways is that the city pairs "out and back" with service are often candidates for the cut shop.
Such information was apparently lost on the author. Sunday afternoon in Charlotte the cheater got me again, when Delta scratched my flight back to LaGuardia. I didn't do some of the basic research that every traveler should do before booking a flight. It could have saved me a lot of embarrassment. Don't forget we waited two hours to be assured by the gate agent that the delay on the inbound flight from LaGuardia would be turned around quickly after landing. That was the information she had. When the ax fell, her explanation was simple: LaGuardia's fault.
Airplane Nightmares
No. Very good. True. According to a statement from ExpressJet, the Delta travel partner that operated the flight, a combination of Air Traffic Control at LaGuardia and a new rule known as FAR117 was the culprit. FAR117 places tighter limits on the number of pilots who can be on duty, as well as actual flying, depending on the day the pilots report for duty and how many legs they have flown. And passenger jet schedules are just legs. The idea is to combat fatigue and improve safety, which is commendable. But when a morning or afternoon flight is seriously delayed, the duty comes into play. By 7:30 p.m. it looks like our staff was nearing its limit, and passenger airlines are already experiencing pilot shortages, hence the cancellation of Delta/ExpressJet. "ExpressJet Airlines is committed to operating all flights as scheduled," the company said.
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Enthusiastic, but not really possible. According to the Department of Transportation's Air Travel Consumer Report, ExpressJet flights reached only 56% of the year in January. Yes, January was a mess of bad weather, but that's the lowest of any carrier in the country. Finding that data was easy. Why didn't I look up before I booked? A little digging would have revealed that my flight, Delta 4976, is among the worst performing flights on the Charlotte-LGA route with 36% on schedule, according to Flightstats on one of several sites, including FlightAware and FlightView, where you can find. performance data. Or, the carriers' own websites. Flight 4976 earned a rating of 0.1 out of 5 - very bad. And not even the worst player on the CLT-LGA road. Delta also has that honor: flight 5204 was dead last, earning a respectable 0.0 rating. Delta mostly owns the bottom of the chart, with at least four flights earning "very poor" status. That's because those "out and back" flights are behind schedule with one delay and another. It's almost a promise.
Why would Delta subject its passengers? Part of the explanation lies in labor costs. Charlotte may be an important market, but Delta does not operate its own equipment there from any New York airport. Instead, the carrier, known as "The Airline with the Big Jets" does business for five travel partners: ExpressJet, Endeavor Air, GoJet, Shuttle America, and Chautauqua Airlines. In other words, you don't fly with the varsity. That saves the company money because passenger pilots are cheaper (in fact, they don't get paid, which is why there is a pilot shortage). But the added complexity can't help five service partners. I overheard an employee of one travel partner trying to explain to a Delta passenger that his flight was being operated by another travel company. The ticket says Delta in name only.
For Delta passengers, it means they could be flying 76-seat Bombardier CJR 900s or 37-seat Embraer RJ 135s. In contrast, US Airways operates a mix of Airbus 319s and 321s along with two commuter jets. If you are an airline, are you going to cancel seat 225 A319 or RJ? And Charlotte is a USAir base, which means it has more flexibility when it comes to moving around aircraft, crews and ultimately passengers - although USAir also has dogs, like flight 2068.
Delta did not provide any compensation for the canceled flight, as weather was a factor. And I should have known better than to risk flying into LaGuardia late in the day. The closest airport to my apartment is Manhattan. Convenience wins over ability. When Joe Biden compared LaGuardia to an airport in the Third World it was taken as an insult - to the Third World.
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The airline gods have punished me for not doing my homework. Choosing Delta was a bad idea in this case: it's not that Delta is a bad carrier (far from it) but Charlotte is not a Delta hub. It appears that Delta does not reward the Charlotte-New York market for operating its own jets. That limits my options if something goes wrong. And he sure did. In the scramble for the remaining seat to New York that evening, my smartphone froze while trying to book my wife and I. At one point we were on separate flights. Then we were nowhere - an agent booked us on a single hopper through Atlanta but before we got to the gate our seats were given away. Next available flight: 12:30 the following day.
So much for those morning meetings. Except that the 12:30 came to 3:30 after a mechanical problem and a flight change, which many of the passengers had bailed out to take their chances on other flights. There were 18 of us on our Embraer 145, a virtual private jet. Once in the air, a cheerful flight attendant asked if I would like a drink. Coffee please, I said. No, she replied. The coffee maker was broken. "If we waited to fix it we would never leave," she said. I must have looked very painted. "Would you like," she said kindly, "a drink for adults?" No, at this point it wasn't going to help.
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