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.

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."

FMI: www.aa.com