More time yet...

[SCCutler]

Quick day trip to Baton Rouge; AA Embraer in the morning, left on time, arrived early; meetings done a little early, beat-feet back to the airport, wait-listed for the flight before ours, "looks good," subsequently all flights canceled.

Car rented, drive from BTR to DFW (4 of us), get car, go home.

Got home at 0245.

Weather at DFW, hub disruption, all flight canceled. All flights canceled.

Flights were going to and from DFW, just none from BTR.

 

[KennyFlys]

Why would weather disrupt flights from only one location?!?!?! I'm confused.

 

[wsuffa]

DFW got whacked again yesterday. Virtually the entire afternoon schedule canceled. And the planes are booked so full that there is no possible way to accomodate everybody within 24 hours or so.

I ended up driving from DFW to SAT a couple of weeks ago when all but one of the AA flights to DFW out of BWI were canceled due to weather at DFW, and the last 5 evening flights DFW-SAT were also canceled. ORD was not an option as the flights BWI-ORD were full. Got home at 3:30 AM, in part because it took an hour from landing to find us an open gate.

 

[colomtnflyer]

Last night, FnF informed us that he had been rocked around pretty good at KSAT, and just now here in Houston, the weather alert has just gone off for tornado alert in Brazorias and Mata counties. Apparently one has been sighted!
The lightning and thunder has been rocking and rolling this place all night and is still very intense outside.... I heard that several people were already killed as this storm passed from Mexico into Texas. This could be a real bad system...

Satellite pics and Doppler show incredible intensity....

 

[wsuffa]

The San Antonio paper has an article today that 150 people from diverted DFW flights were put up at a local school in San Antonio. All hotels in town, apparently, are full due to Fiesta.

Ugh.

 

[SCCutler]

I was speculating whether we should have tried to take CO, via IAH, and get home that way, but I suspect pretty strongly that we would only have succeeded in getting ourselves stranded in Houston instead of Louisiana, and wasted several hours in the process. In any event, when we found a car that the rental operators would allow to be "dropped" in Texas, we took it and moved on. Our modest good fortune: Enterprise had a Texas-based car that someone had "dropped" in Baton Rouge, and they were trying to figure out how best to get it back this way. Lucky can, occasionally, beat good.

---

When WX whacks DFW, as it did indeed and persistently do yesterday, the AA system is well and truly bunged up for quite a while (as is the case with any carrier's hub). I really don't blame them for just hitting the "pause" button and recovering the next day, rather than flying airplanes all over the place and having off-line diverts, etc. I just wish that they'd communicate a little better about their intentions.

 

[Treffin]

I am starting to see a pattern here...and it isn't one for landing. I was at the hotel in Seattle this morning and got a call from AA at 9:30am regarding my 5:10pm flight back to DFW. They told me that my 5:10pm flight was going to be delayed until 6:30pm. I told em to confirm my upgrade on the noon flight and I would catch that one instead. They did so and I made it home.

I checked FlightAware when I got home and noticed that the original flight didn't even leave SEA until after 7pm tonight. It won't be in here until almost 1am.

What a mess...I have to wonder if this is poor planning or whether they had a plane problem elsewhere that was going to throw off the entire day.

Dave