In what had to be an incredibly difficult day for many flyers, American Airlines had a flight yesterday that had a 9 hour delay before taking the 30 minute flight from Dallas to Oklahoma City.
Because the plane was not delayed on the tarmac, passengers were allowed two opportunities to get off – once for good and once for food. Passengers were saying that it appeared the crew as not around at various times during the delay and passengers actually helped themselves to the onboard drinks. The delay started out as a weather-based delay and continued on because of a mechanical problem. After 8 hours, the crew timed out and they had to be replaced by another crew. As we can all imagine, the travelers were extremely agitated and frustrated with the delay.
The flight was scheduled to take-off at 1:45PM (CT) and did not take-off until 10:48PM (CT). After take-off, the flight lasted 30 minutes and that incredible long day was over. As of a few hours ago, at least one passenger had not yet been contacted by AA and had not received any compensation for the delay. It had to be equally frustrating for passengers if they had noticed that another AA flight took off from Dallas to Oklahoma City – a full 3 hours before flight 382 took off! Hopefully any passengers that had gotten off the plane were able to get on that flight instead.
Timeline of events from the horrid @AmericanAir 382 on 2/27. Still no contact from American #AmericanAirlineshttp://t.co/aNl1Im3HAr
— Brandon Sullivan (@BTSullivan91) March 1, 2015
Source: Mail Online
The passengers I feel sorry for, are the ones on the Greyhound bus that that was rear end by a semi. The accident happened on the westbound lanes of I-44 during bad weather.
http://www.stltoday.com/news/state-and-regional/missouri/injured-in-chain-of-accidents-on-missouri-highway/article_22bba0d8-312f-51a3-a718-be6a6d03f3a2.html
It is very sad to me that people are so quick to whine when things don’t go correctly IN A SNOWSTORM.
The headline should be “Airline gets passengers home safely despite adverse weather.”
No one was hurt and the weather was atrocious. Let’s all remember that.
Maybe the people that are expecting compensation for something that was partially out of the airline’s control should instead express some gratitude that the worst thing that happened to them was a late flight.
I don’t think it is quick to whine. We are talking about spending longer on a regional jet than most flights to Europe would take. I know I would be thankful to make it safely, but once the problem switch from weather to mechanical, it becomes a different conversation.
I just wonder if AA could have handled it differently. They canceled four other flights to OKC during that timeframe due to weather – why not this one? Airlines do transport people by bus when necessary, did that ever come up as an option for such a short distance?