I don’t know why we all accept as accurate the notion that this crew, and this crew alone, was the only one in the Midwest that could staff the flight in St. Louis that day.
Do any crew live near St. Louis?
Or how about crews in Dallas, KC, Detroit, Nashville, etc. who could have boarded a flight with open seats to get to St. Louis?
Do any crew live near St. Louis?
Or how about crews in Dallas, KC, Detroit, Nashville, etc. who could have boarded a flight with open seats to get to St. Louis?
Great questions.
Also, UAL has a later flight, on that same route .... why not put the crew on that flight?
Delta and American also have later, same route flights.
Might not have been the answer, but just terrible how this situation was handled.
I believe it. Since deregulation, the "hub" geometry now in use and cost-cutting in general means that there is absolutely no margin of any kind or room for error or even bad weather anywhere. There are no extra planes. There is no extra time. There are no extra crews. There are no extra runways. If any one of those goes wrong for any reason, whether it's breakdown or weather or sickness or a Captain stuck behind an accident on his way to the airport, it ripples to the next flight, the next plane, the next city. And maybe that ripple causes other ripples.
How many times have we heard that a flight going from A to B was delayed, therefore 10 flights at B waiting for its passengers coming from A had to wait before they could go to C and D and E and F. And maybe furthermore those delayed flights from B to C and from B to D meant that flights out of C and D were delayed too.
And then as those flight delays accumulate, now somewhere one of those crews has been delayed so long that they aren't allowed to be the crew on that last flight, and now somebody's delayed because that flight needs a new crew.
Sky nazis