I wish they would state the real reasons for flight delays

[Bob Noel]

warning: whining about air travel

For the past couple of hours I've been listening to the robovoice claim that DL 1440 is delays because of late arrival of the airplane. Yet, it arrived at 6:40pm, which is before the 7pm scheduled departure (actually they originally posted a delay until 7:20pm).

Then they changed it to a 9pm departure and still blamed the late arrival.

The real reason is ground delays into Boston (30 minutes and decreasing) yet the flight is delayed two hours.

I hate commercial air travel.

 

[ScottM]

warning: whining about air travel

For the past couple of hours I've been listening to the robovoice claim that DL 1440 is delays because of late arrival of the airplane. Yet, it arrived at 6:40pm, which is before the 7pm scheduled departure (actually they originally posted a delay until 7:20pm).

Then they changed it to a 9pm departure and still blamed the late arrival.

The real reason is ground delays into Boston (30 minutes and decreasing) yet the flight is delayed two hours.

I hate commercial air travel.

My favorite is when they blame it on WX and there is not a single rain return on NexRad for the entire nation and the WX depiction show no IFR let alone MVFR conditions anywhere. BUt if one looks at the arrivals they can see that the plane we need to be on has not yet arrived.

 

[Skip Miller]

The best disinformation system I have encountered is at KPHL. Maybe was at KPHL is more fair, as I have avoided that airport for 15 years now (and counting).

The central flight status boards (listing all flights at the airport) is run by the City of Phila, and they update it when they felt like it. There was no effort to keep it accurate within say 24 hours (and I suspect it was worse than that). So all flights were listed on time.

Then when you got to your airline's turf (and in this case I am talking about USAir) the monitors were driven from the US Air computers and therefore frequently in conflict with the City's terminals. Those were a little better. Yet if you could step to the side of the gate desks and look at the CRTs that the gate agents used, you could see the latest.

I never got any explanation as to why the USAir monitors for pax viewing was not updated with the real time data. I guess, as passengers, we didn't need to know.

-Skip