Review Sparked By Complaints From Angry Stranded Pax
American Airlines is looking
at what happened last week when several planes bound for Dallas
diverted to nearby airports for weather, then sat on the ramp --
one for eight hours -- with no relief for the passengers.
Last Friday, a series of storms limited traffic in and out of
Dallas-Fort Worth much of the day. Many flights were either
diverted or cancelled. As ANN reported, one flight
from San Francisco scheduled to land at DFW around 11:00 ended up
on the ramp at Austin, TX where it sat until around 21:00.
Passengers aboard the flight were left sitting (and stewing) in the
aircraft.
The airline says it has procedures in place to deal with
diverted flights on stormy days, but historically those days only
see 40-50 diversions. Last Friday, American diverted 85 flights --
and it says some of its employees kept changing or delaying
decisions about what to do with them because of the
unpredictability of the weather. Additionally, the number of
diversions overwhelmed facilities and personnel at some of the
places jets ended up -- like Austin.
In some cases, diverted aircraft arrived at an airport only to
find there were no available gates. In others, departing airplanes
were loaded and started, only to be held up waiting for weather to
clear at their destinations. In the mean time, an arriving jet
takes the just-vacated gate leaving the departing jet with no place
to go. The whole bloody mess was sort of like an elaborate,
complicated and expensive game of musical chairs.
Although a few passengers commended the crews stranded on the
ramp with them, many complained of being left in the dark, with no
information from a cabin crew seemingly unconcerned with their
discomfort.
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In some cases, even after passengers were allowed to deplane at
an airport to which they had diverted, the airline wasn't
forthcoming with information for follow-on flights to get them to
their destinations.
Glenn W. Scott, an assistant professor of journalism at Elon
University in North Carolina said, "You'd think some supervisor,
some exec, might have the guts to come out to apologize and to hold
a mike and explain what AA had in store for us. But we just stood
there waiting, passing around a lot of inaccurate speculation."
All of this has the carrier trying to determine if it could have
better handled the situation.
American spokesman John Hotard told the Dallas Morning News,
"One facet in particular is how we divert aircraft -– what
cities do we divert them to and how do you ensure that one city
doesn't get overloaded? That said, Friday was so overwhelming, with
double the number of normal diversions, that we almost didn't have
anywhere else to put airplanes."
The carrier cancelled 426 flights last Friday because of the
weather. Flights were diverted to airports all around DFW including
Shreveport, LA; Little Rock, AR; San Antonio, TX; Longview, TX;
Tulsa, OK; and others.
In one case, an international flight inbound from Zurich,
Switzerland diverted to Tulsa; the airport there has no customs
facilities. After the long flight from Europe, the crew was
prevented from continuing because of crew rest issues. The
passengers were forced to remain aboard the aircraft until another
crew was flown in to take them to DFW -- the next day. They ended
up spending 22 hours on the jet.
Hotard says diverting the jet to Tulsa was a mistake, but at the
time it was the nearest airport. "That's one of the issues we're
looking at -- where they diverted to and why," he said.
With so many crews and
aircraft out of place on Friday, the cancellations rippled into the
following week's schedule. American says it cancelled some 300 more
flights on Saturday and Sunday, nearly all directly related to
Friday's weather.
Of course, none of this information was available to the
passengers sitting in cramped airliners all over the south central
US. Knowing the situation would likely be of little physical
comfort to those caught in the middle -- sitting in coach -- unable
to depart or deplane, but it would certainly help quell some of the
tremendous frustration.
Hotard said, "Obviously, American Airlines apologizes to its
customers for what we put them through during this holiday
period."