AA Flight 706 cancelled "Due to weather"?

[nstock]

Hi,
I'm hoping to gather more information and I'm not sure where else to turn...

On New Year's Eve, my wife and I were scheduled to fly on AA flight 706 from Philadelphia to Seattle. About 14 hours prior to the scheduled take off, we were informed the flight had been cancelled.

When we contacted American Airlines about this, we were told it was "due to weather."

This claim seems strange to me, for several reasons:

1) The flight was cancelled 14 hours prior to scheduled departure, and there was no indication of inclement weather in either the departure city or destination city.

2) At around the same time as AA flight 706 was scheduled to depart, there was another flight, Alaska flight 17, that had the exact same route. This flight completed the route without issue.

3) The aircraft that was supposed to be flight 706 had arrived in the Philadelphia airport 22 hours prior to the scheduled departure.

When we asked American for clarification, they simply said "Bad weather can really cause difficulties for everyone involved." Now, this is a really frustrating response, as it completely ignores our question. Based on the above pieces of information, I don't understand how weather had any affect on the flight, and the refusal to provide actual details makes me feel like we're either being given the run-around, or being straight-up lied to.

So I guess what I want to know, other than "Why, American, are you giving us this terrible experience?" is, Is the circumstances I've outlined above unusual, or am I just missing something?
Thanks,
Nathan

 

[bob@las-AA]

Hi,
I'm hoping to gather more information and I'm not sure where else to turn...

On New Year's Eve, my wife and I were scheduled to fly on AA flight 706 from Philadelphia to Seattle. About 14 hours prior to the scheduled take off, we were informed the flight had been cancelled.

When we contacted American Airlines about this, we were told it was "due to weather."

This claim seems strange to me, for several reasons:

1) The flight was cancelled 14 hours prior to scheduled departure, and there was no indication of inclement weather in either the departure city or destination city.

2) At around the same time as AA flight 706 was scheduled to depart, there was another flight, Alaska flight 17, that had the exact same route. This flight completed the route without issue.

3) The aircraft that was supposed to be flight 706 had arrived in the Philadelphia airport 22 hours prior to the scheduled departure.

When we asked American for clarification, they simply said "Bad weather can really cause difficulties for everyone involved." Now, this is a really frustrating response, as it completely ignores our question. Based on the above pieces of information, I don't understand how weather had any affect on the flight, and the refusal to provide actual details makes me feel like we're either being given the run-around, or being straight-up lied to.

So I guess what I want to know, other than "Why, American, are you giving us this terrible experience?" is, Is the circumstances I've outlined above unusual, or am I just missing something?
Thanks,
Nathan

It seems that American did give you accurate information, the same information that is reported to the DOT on the reason why the flight was canceled and that reporting is required by law. That's just what happens this time of year.

 

[nstock]

I guess what I'm wondering is: how could that be? How can a flight be cancelled due to weather 14 hours ahead of its departure time when the plane is already at the airport and other flights with the same route - at comparable times - run without issue?

bob@, Would you be able to point me to where the information reported to the DOT can be found?

 

[eolesen]

Alaska had an airplane and crew ready to go. AA didn't. This happens dozens of times a day under ideal circumstances, and hundreds of times a day when the weather sucks..

New Years Eve saw record low temps all over the country, and anything mechanical will eventually freeze, including planes.

Your flight needs more than just an aircraft. You also need a crew, and they don't just sit around for 10-14 hours waiting for your departure. Most likely, the real aircraft and crew were coming from somewhere else that forced that flight to be canceled due to the weather.

 

[nstock]

To clarify, the cancellation was 14 hours prior, not 22 hours - though it stills seems (to me, at least) really early. As a further clarification, the record low temperatures on the east coast came *after* the scheduled departure, not prior.

An interesting theory, that the coldness prior to the flight caused the issue. But, the record low temperatures on the east coast came *after* the scheduled departure, not leading up to it. At their coldest the night before, temperatures were 14 degress at the airport (according to Weather Underground). I don't know how planes are affected at that temperature, but I know they fly in colder conditions, and it looks like only one other flight out of Philadelphia was cancelled that day (JZA8033). I would think that more flights would have been affected were the cold to be the culprit, and cancelling that early for that reason makes no sense whatsoever. Without further evidence, this theory doesn't really fit.

It seems more likely to have to do with not having a flight crew, and in fact a flight to PHL from SEA was cancelled that day. So... it seems quite possible that aspects of that flight were critical to this flight. The problem is that, if true, it only moves the question back one step: how was *that* flight cancelled due to weather? It doesn't appear that there were any other flights out of Seattle that were cancelled within the 4 hours prior to or after the scheduled departure (so weather problems at the time of scheduled take off are ruled out), and there were no AA flights *into* Seattle that had been cancelled in the preceding 48 hours.

One thing I haven't been able to factor into this is any part *delays* may have played - I've found a fair amount of information regarding cancellations, but nothing useful regarding delays. Are there any resources that could help with that piece of the puzzle?

 

[UPNAWAY]

Your thinking about this all wrong. You are looking only at your flight and your city pair. In a huge network the issues could literally be anywhere. Lets say an airline has to cancel 10 flights tomorrow because of weather today in order to get the airline back on track for tomorrow. You start looking for flights to cancel that impact the customers and the system the least. So you try and do cancellations at HUBs, on lower booked flights, with plenty of space on flights the next day, etc. etc. And that doesn't even include Crew displacement issues or Aircraft Maintenance. Maybe the aircraft was there but missed a schedule check the night before due to the weather it cannot fly. There are dozens of intertwined specific factors that can cause a flight to cancel when weather was the root cause to begin with. Also with a flight canceled in advance that also could have been based on the forecast which in the end might not have been as accurate or even the bad weather arriving later than expected.