My commuter flight landed at O’Hare on a sunny day last winter in time for lunch. My flight to sunny, and much warmer Florida would depart at 1:30. I looked at the TV monitor to confirm the usefulness of the sun tan lotion and sandals in my carry-on.
The screen promised that I would indeed be dining by the sea that evening, but to my surprise, most of the flights after mine glowed canceled. By the time I boarded, snow flurries turned to serious snow and ground crews sprayed ethylene glycol de-icing solution on the wings of my aircraft. We taxied and took off into a blur of white. When I reached the hotel near Sanibel Island, I turned on the TV newscast, which announced O’Hare had been closed by snow.
The events of that day piqued my curiosity. How does an airline decide if and when to cancel most of its flights from a major hub? And how should a flier react when the TV monitor colorfully shows “canceled”?
Earlier this winter, I spoke with several American Airlines officials at its Dallas/Ft. Worth Airport headquarters to learn the secrets of airline planning. Chicago’s O’Hare Airport is one of American’s three domestic hubs.
American’s System Operations Control, about the size of a football field and two stories high, occupies part of its Flight Academy campus. If you want to visualize it, think of NASA mission control. SOC dispatches and monitors American’s 2,400 daily flights. On the floor beneath American SOC, American Eagle SOC fills a somewhat smaller, but similar facility, responsible for Eagle’s 1,750 daily flights. Eagle consists of four commuter carriers, all owned by American’s parent, AMR Inc. Eagle provides air service for smaller markets, with the Simmons division responsible for O’Hare.
Art Pappas, managing director of American’s SOC, explained: “We’re here to run the day-to-day operation of the airline, trying to maximize profits as best we can. And we’re responsible for utilizing the resources of the company, the airplanes, the terminals, the employees, everything else, to get customers from A to B, and leave exactly on time and arrive exactly on time.”
No trip for you, no profit for American. SOC decides whether you fly or stay.
“Safety,” Pappas said, “is our No. 1 priority; that’s why the winter storms are so important to us, so we’re not operating into conditions we think would be unsafe.”
SOC handles crisis management and monitors security threats as well as routine and emergency situations, such as weather events, natural disasters, civil unrest and accidents/incidents. It keeps an eye on the latest volcano, coup d’etat and, most important for Chicagoans, snowstorms and thunderstorms. The dispatchers work within SOC, serving as the pilot’s eyes and ears on the ground, and remain in contact with all American flights in the air.
Other SOC divisions deal with such mundane but essential tasks for every flight, such as weight and balance of the aircraft. Using data provided by the Federal Aviation Administration, SOC staff can view the position of every aircraft in flight in the U.S. at any given moment and the direction in which the aircraft is traveling.
Meteorologists occupy a large, separate room adjoining SOC. Large color monitors display satellite and Doppler radar weather video, while printers spew out charts and graphs of weather patterns and statistics.
During a recent visit, four people (out of a full-time, 24-hour staff of 19 meteorologists) busily monitored data pouring in on computer terminals. One person exclusively monitors turbulence. One screen displays the National Lightning Detector, which even in December puts on quite a light show, lighting up with strikes anywhere in the country. On this day, a storm churning toward Dallas from the West Coast was of particular interest to the staff.
Through its resources, as well as those of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and private weather data and forecasting firms, American’s meteorologists can pinpoint weather anywhere in the world. More important, they work feverishly to predict it, particularly for the company’s hub airports: Dallas, Chicago and Miami.
Warren Qualley, manager of weather services, proudly showed me a chart comparing American’s forecasts with those from the National Weather Service for the airline’s hub airports. The American forecasts were about 4 percent more accurate, a difference that can mean tens of thousands of dollars to an airline. (He noted, in all fairness, that American need not provide forecasts for every town in the country as does the NWS.)
Existing prediction methods fail to satisfy Qualley. In cooperation with the University of Oklahoma, American is pursuing a new weather forecasting technology nicknamed “Hub Caps.” Planned for initial testing this winter, the system should be able to forecast individual storms on a county level six hours in advance.
Pappas noted that forecasting Chicago O’Hare is easier than Dallas/Ft. Worth Airport. The DFW area of Texas contains all the ingredients for creating severe weather that then forms in the Dallas area, while Chicago mainly experiences systems that form hundreds of miles to the west, with the exception of lake-effect snows.
“We can usually see a snowstorm developing three or four days ahead of time,” Qualley said. “The timing, amount and type we can usually get within 48 hours, and a better idea 24 hours ahead of time. We take that information to the planners and dispatch managers and say, `Here’s what we think is going to happen. . . .’ They make the decisions. Sometimes we’ll cancel 50 percent of our flights and the weather turns out clear.”
When one of American’s meteorologists becomes agitated, your chances of escaping O’Hare begin to decrease. If a major snowstorm appears a couple of hundred miles west of O’Hare moving toward Chicago, things start jumping at SOC.
“When we get into a weather event,” Pappas said, “we’re always trying to stay out in front. We want to see it coming. We want to operate into the city where the disruption’s going to happen up to the point where we think it’s no longer safe. Then we want to get out at the right time, but we also want to get back in before anybody else.
“For example, we had a big snowstorm back East; we operated into the New York City area, got everybody in that we could, left some airplanes in New York, and pulled the rest of the fleet out–those airplanes we couldn’t protect. We then stayed out for a day and a half. When we restarted, we had already positioned 20 airplanes in Boston, Philadelphia, Newark, Kennedy, LaGuardia and other cities. So when we started to operate we were there, and we were ready.”
Most passengers aren’t aware that although airplanes are rugged in the air, they are vulnerable on the ground. Excessive surface winds can hurl debris and ground equipment at them, and they must be kept free of ice and snow.
“We learned if you try to operate too late into the weather, you then get into a big ball, and it literally will take you days to pull away from it,” Pappas said. “So when you have an `event,’ we try to contain the event to the day it happens. If we have a weather event in Chicago, we want to try to take our lumps the day it happens, but by the next morning we want to be back on schedule. We don’t want to explain to the customer on a sunny Monday why they’re 2 1/2 hours late because we got into a weather session the day before.”
Once SOC makes the decision to cancel flights, the computer instructs reservation agents to call customers on those flights offering alternative routings, or asking them not to come to the airport and telling them they will be rebooked on later flights.
For example, if Chicago closes and a Los Angeles passenger is flying to Boston via Chicago, American re-routes the person through Dallas. If the person is flying from Chicago to Boston, and the weather forecast calls for heavy continuing snow, the airline may rebook the person for a flight the next day.
Advance notification of fliers follows a specific order. American’s most frequent fliers, with Platinum and Gold AAdvantage status, and First Class passengers receive priority, as do those connecting to international flights. However, once checked-in at the airport most passengers become equals, although Platinum frequent fliers can deal with a private check-in counter and may receive special attention.
Unlike some airlines, American massively revamps its schedule to deal with weather. “What we try to do is put the whole plan in place with one fell swoop,” Pappas said. “What we like to do is go in and say this is when the weather is going to be here, this is how long it will last. So when we tell you your one o’clock has been canceled, we don’t rebook you on something that also may be canceled. We rebook you on something we know is going to operate. We think by staying in front of the storm we serve the customer.”
However, the airline may retain certain flights to cities with limited service, markets with special priority, a destination with a major convention, flights not duplicated by other airlines or where the plane and/or crew is needed at a certain destination. When SOC proposes mass weather cancellations, it first consults with American personnel in all cities affected, to ascertain the need/demand for specific flights.
American exempts its European flights from this planning. Because most depart only once a day and are necessary for returning staff and passengers from Europe (American does not keep spare international aircraft overseas), European departures receive a very high priority in the event of bad weather, assuming it remains safe to fly. Most other airlines with international flights maintain a similar policy.
Operating on the principle of inconveniencing the least number of people possible, American’s widebody aircraft often receive priority in bad weather. So although an MD80 flight with 120 passengers to LA may be canceled, the following 767 flight with 190 passengers might remain on the schedule.
Because most American aircraft share the same advanced avionics that allow operation in marginal weather, type of aircraft, per se, is not a factor. However, the experience of the crew does make a difference. A captain with thousands of hours in a certain aircraft will see service in difficult weather, while a less experienced captain will be reassigned to less demanding routes.
Unfortunately, you can’t learn this information from an agent, because it is not in the reservations computer system. (Some of American’s planes are technically capable of landing in zero visibility, but neither the FAA nor American permits this.)
After the information leaves weather services, it goes to Danny Burgin, or one of four other SOC managers.
Big events are easy, but “a lot of the `maybe-they-are, maybe-they-aren’t’ decisions come from experience and gut feelings,” Burgin said. “Take the other morning in Chicago. The snow was supposed to be over at 7, and it was still snowing. De-icing was taking 10 minutes when you walked in; now it’s at 20 minutes. In a de-icing event, common in Chicago, only so many airplanes can leave and arrive. You don’t want gridlock.”
(Thunderstorms are different. Because they may dissipate before reaching an airport, massive reaction is often unnecessary. “You don’t do much until one strikes, Burgin said.)
Paul Prizi, operations coordinator, shows off his pride and joy, a computer terminal nicknamed “The Cancellator” (and called, by some, “The Hub Slasher”). Using proprietary software this computer, within minutes, can close down or dramatically reduce flights at an American hub. Before the computer, it took more than an hour to calculate an intelligent cancellation sequence.
Prizi prints out the cancellations that might have occurred at O’Hare on Nov. 21, the day of the morning snow. The two-foot-long sheet begins with a flight to Rochester, N.Y., at 6:55 a.m. and ends with a flight departing for Los Angeles at 11:55 a.m.–about 60 flights. Fortunately, the snow blew over, and Prizi never pushed the button, meaning very few flights were canceled. (On normal days American cancels an average of 10 of its 2,400 systemwide flights.)
“Our goal,” Prizi said, “is to keep the airline running.” But other departments have different goals such as keeping keep crews on all of the airplanes or getting passengers where they want to be.
“We come up with the basic plan that says, `Here’s what we’d like to do,’ and distribute it to all the departments. We ask if there any problems that will cause further problems. Tell us about it now, and we’ll take these cancellations off the list and find others. We’re flexible, because it’s a resource. I need to keep an airplane some place for six hours, whether I cancel a round trip between Chicago and Newark, or whether I cancel a round-trip between Chicago and Denver. My goal is either to keep that airplane away from Chicago or in Chicago, based on the circumstances. We don’t look at revenue.”
American Eagle SOC operates independently on a shorter time frame than American, because its flights are usually shorter. Although American may act six hours in advance, Eagle might respond two hours ahead of the weather.
So what does all this mean for the traveler?
To avoid being caught by the weather, always call your airline at the last possible moment before departing for the airport. And once you’re at the airport, if heavy snow hits and the airline cancels banks of flights, your best bet is to immediately rebook for the next day. Go home–or find a hotel room or a friend with whom to stay; it beats sleeping on the floor of the airport.
Running between airlines, confronting gate agents with hysterics or demands will not transport you to your destination any sooner. Once an airline opts to cancel a flight, it will not reinstate it.
When storms hit, what seems like madness is a carefully refined method by the airline. Remember, an airline only makes money when it flies you to your destination.
