We just saw what an impending storm can cause when it comes to flight cancellations.  One thing that people often wonder at is the reason their flight was cancelled when it isn’t snowing yet in their departure city.

In fact, people are often left wondering what happened to their flight when it isn’t even forecast to snow in their departure city.

It has to do with with an airline’s network.  An airline may have to cancel a flight in one city because the aircraft is stuck in another city due to weather.  That’s really a common occurrence. 

Sometimes an impending storm results in an airline cancelling flights in advance of the arrival of a snow storm.  There are a lot of valid reasons for doing this.  It may be unwise to send a flight out to a city where the airline doesn’t customarily overnight aircraft.  Doing so potentially leaves the aircraft and its flight crew orphaned in an unknown city and unusable when weather does clear.

Since storms, particularly snow storms, can leave an airline’s network destroyed, it is attractive to the airline to keep its aircraft at its hub(s) so that when the storm does clear, it has the equipment to get people on their way immediately. 

Another reason is that snow storms approach a lot of cities with a great deal of uncertainty.  It’s poor safety to send aircraft to a city prior to a potential snow storm because that storm may arrive early causing the aircraft to divert or hazard a landing in poor conditions. 

Flight cancellations are painful not because of the immediate inconvenience.  They are painful because airlines often are incapable of taking care of a customer for days afterwards.  That may be unacceptable.  There isn’t anything that an airline is going to do about it unless forced to.  The best alternative is to really weigh consequences of sticking to your travel plans.

Most airlines welcome a change to an earlier flight and offer the ability to do so without penalty in these situations.  Take advantage of that.  Sometimes no matter how much you want to go, you can’t.  Skip your trip if you can get a refund and many airlines will offer such a thing during bad storms. Flex a little and avoid being that person stuck in an airport for 4 days clinging to the idea of taking a flight somewhere.

Filed under: Airline News, Airline Service, Airports, Travel Hints by ajax
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