Why do flights get canceled?

[DJTorrente]

The answer to questions of the form “Why do the airlines XXXX?” is always the same: money. Details are largely irrelevant.

As true as that is, I think this advice is applicable:

After all, lottery tickets are one way to make money, too...

 

[tspear]

After all, lottery tickets are one way to make money, too...

And more likely to be profitable than aviaition.

Tim

 

[bbchien]

What bothers me more is when you buy a ticket two months in advance and pay a premium price based on schedule or number of layovers and then the airline then changes the flight by hours or adds additional stops just a week before flying. They will offer a refund but what good does that do if you now need to buy a last minute ticket at an inflated price. It seems to be happening more and more often over the past two years. I understand weather or maintenance issues the day of flight but if you are going to sell me a flight and that price is directly tied to the flight times or number of layovers then there should be some sort of compensation to the passengers when the airline just decideds to change its scheduled flights.

That is the blessing of a FIKI aircraft with redundancy.
Of course there are other downsides....but I'm not having ANY of that 121 irresponsibility.

 

[Mason]

I’m curious to know how many are cancelled by an actual person making the decision vs. a computer just spitting it out.

All of them.

 

[Shepherd]

Welcome to IROPS.


ETA: in GA, we have these things known as hangar fairies; they do stuff to the plane when the owner and maintainers aren’t around, sometimes with unintended consequences.

In the airline world, you have schedule fairies. They do the same thing, just with the daily flight ops schedule.

We used to call them gremlins.