Why Airline Delays Snowball

Airline schedule “meltdowns” seem to be in the news of late. Whether the event is experienced broadly throughout the industry, or confined to a single carrier, one of the first questions that arises is why it is that a disruptive event, like a storm, can last just a few hours, yet it can take several days or even a week before the airline(s) involved are back to normal operations?


This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.avweb.com/insider/airline-delays-snowball

I am so happy I finally retired from business travel this year. I don’t miss those delays.

Well darn, my former employer called me out of retirement for a trip next week. We’ll see how it goes.

Aggressive investment in infrastructure is a normal cost of doing business nowadays as severe climate events are not just a one or two times per year thing anymore and need to be planned for as a part of “normal ops”. If it were not for the fairly noncompetitive nature of the airline industry, inadequate infrastructure systems would not be tolerated. And the Murphy’s Law scenario presented here is a misguided explanation of negative results. Murphy’s Law is an observation by an individual to help them gain control over situations that are completely out of their control. The scenario provided implies that the system failed due to events that were out of the control of the airlines which couldn’t be further from the truth. The scenario is peppered with examples that - if proper procedures were in place and implemented - the snowball effect could have been avoided. Which brings me back to my first statement. And although this article may be one explanation of why broad delays happen, it does not justify the reality of it.

Thanks for the illustrative scenario.

A key problem in two cases was inability of airline crews to contact Operations Centre.

Southwest Airlines’ incoming telephone lines became overloaded. SWA hadn’t hustled to implement the crew scheduling chunk of IT upgrades it started before the SARS2 panicdemic. Even text messaging or email would have helped greatly - facilitating crew members telling OC where they were.
Decades ago some airlines used a private service of Compuserve to communicate - today smartphones would give access from almost anywhere. But the flakey pair running AOL messed that service up with incompetence after it purchased Compuserve.
(An example at the time of SWA’s big disruption was a flight ready to depart but lacking a pilot - yet a qualified pilot was in the back deadheading, willing to fly that departure as well.)

I agree with the issues discussed by the author, and huge weather events that stop flights for many hours or days will always cause problems.

But, the reason for little issues, like a single flight crew timing out, or a single plane’s mechanical problems leading to major complications for passengers is because of the airlines running their business so lean, so there is no redundancy. Since another airline is running this way, and ticket price is everything, they have to do it too. It didn’t used to be this way.

Airliners have flights set up so they are full or nearly so to maximize profits, as businesses do. But, in so doing, when things go a little wrong, they go very badly for the customer as there is no flight to get them on that is not already full.

We’ve seen this in medicine, too, where hospitals have to run very lean because they do not control their pricing or are provided extra funds to purchase and maintain infrastructure for disasters. During COVID, we did not have enough ventilators, medicine, or masks. Now, ventilators are expensive to keep sitting around and not use without some type of government program, but I can tell you that hospitals are being run extremely lean these days.

The lean manufacturing philosophy has trickled into a lot more industries, and the consumer is no longer the first consideration.

As a business consultant who analyzes business processes and with over 3M “butt in the seat” miles, I can say most of the problems result from centralized control. Central control never works. Not in governments and not in businesses. Prior to the big airline consolidation and subsequent layoffs of experienced people, airline crews and station managers could make individual decisions based on local conditions. Yes, some aircraft had to take on more fuel and plan for a hold but passengers were much more likely to get to their destinations. Most ground crews thought their station manager were tyrants and clairvoyant because they were. Years of experience taught them when the weather was going to you know and how to deal with it. Now, it seems to me station manager do not have a clue what to do.

Beautiful explanation! I had a few good laughs because, as you can probably appreciate - those who have been there say “one day we will look back at this and have a good laugh about it.”

When it works perfectly, the over-leaned operation looks like a marvel of efficiency. When it falls apart it becomes a fecal ticker tape parade.

I read this article the other day, and I’ve been thinking it over. The story isn’t plausible as-presented. You have a scenario where the airport is so small that a single pushback incident stops all activity. There is no other ramp area, no other taxiway to get around two intwined airplanes. Yet this same airport is so large that it is a major hub for a major carrier and creates a national (or possibly worldwide) disruption.

I suppose it was necessary in order to tell the story, but it can’t actually work like that. The airport is either a small enough one to be hampered by a single ground incident like this (San Diego maybe?) or it is large enough for a big problem to create a wide-scale disruption (Atlanta). It can’t be both. A single pushback can’t really start the avalanche at a big airport. It’s not enough.

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