Agree my good friend who works for another airline that starts with "S" has not received any emails asking them to work to help regain operational control from a weather event 2 days ago. The best I can hope for is that this will make them actually *think* about hiring and upgrading more then they have for the last year. Summer should be fun.

 

Did they now? Ok, we’ll just accept that for the time being.

I didn’t say NKS I is some well oiled machine or that they couldn’t have handled it better. But compared to our competitors we have only a fraction of the resources (read manpower and planes) to throw at problems like this over a major holiday weekend, and our high time airframe use means that each plane’s being out of position effects more flights on average than other airlines.

Clearly this weekend caused a shakeup in Miramar as things are still a bit in flux. But everyone had a bad weekend operating on the east coast. Let MSP and ATL get hit simultaneously, or IAH and ORD and tell me how good DAL and UAL look trying to pick up the pieces.

 

I’m going to agree to disagree with you. All those airlines would have probably been proactively cancelling and rescheduling crews to get them into position to clean up after the weather had moved out. I’m not saying those airlines are perfect but I’ve never seen a Delta or United flight attendant sleeping in an airport in uniform before.

It’s just a lack of investment and learning from the past. This happens nearly every year. There were flight attendants sleeping in the MCO and FLL airports that weren’t legal to work the next day because they didn’t have the man power to get hotels for them that obviously added to the problem. There were flights that boarded up and then cancelled because they thought pilots were there when they were in some other city. It’s hard to recover an operation when you probably have 5 schedulers and 1 person working the hotel desk and several hundred people all calling at the same time trying to get help. Also this wasn’t an unforeseen weather event or a massive computer outage. It was forecasted for days that this line was going to cause havoc in Florida and up the east coast and still nothing proactive. Just keep going until it stops working... We finally start getting some positive press and they dropped the ball. They never seem to learn from the past.


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Yeah Friday was a nightmare and a half. We dug ourselves a pretty big hole to get out of as far as metrics go. Back to the back of the class!

 

They absolutely should have tried to get more help in the office in lieu of the forecast. How many would have showed up on a holiday weekend? Can they force those people to come to work? Is the OT pay enough to entice them to leave their families on Easter weekend? It’s not as cut and dried as “we shoulda had more people in hand”. I’m sure I could have raised my hand to get premium
pay, but I wasn’t leaving my family this weekend.

 

I’m not saying it was as easy as calling people in on their weekend off. It’s much bigger than that. It’s not even having a plan in place for when something like this happens. Send a couple management types to all the crew rooms with company cards who can make decisions to get people hotel rooms and reschedule the available crews, send out an email giving people options on what to do and what not to do. The whole “we can’t book you a hotel we have to wait for our vendor to do it” needs to change when something like this happens. They could also invest a little money to make scheduling/notifications more automated. I get a text from a restaurant saying my table is ready, why can’t spirit attempt something like that for hotels and cancellations instead of sitting on hold for 2 hours for them to just tell you they don’t know what they’re doing with you. It’s not fair to nor the fault of the schedulers. They don’t have the tools to do their jobs when something like this happens.


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I agree with most all of that. Our dependence on internal IT is hamstringing the operation in many ways.

As for getting mgr types headed out to authorize crew rooms I’d simply say it’s a holiday weekend, and I haven’t worked at a operation yet where higher ups were having anything to do with their job on those days. Even though they are usually our busiest.

 

Still canceling flights on Monday. They weren’t prepared

 

Was going down to MCO today for a family Vacay and cancelled the 7ish flight DFW-MCO. Made it an interesting day to say the least!

 

Ironically I heard that was for maintenance...plane and crews were there