Hope -
From an operating stand point, things are going very well. Departure / Arrival performance is even better then I ever expected. One problem that I have noticed (with the new turn times) is that it is tough to recover from a delay. If a flight has a mechanical, crew rest or other delay, recovery is a little harder in/out of PHL. With that being said, we are recovering a lot of time due to the short taxi from out to off. Once again average taxi times yesterday were 13-15 minutes, versus the old 30-45 minutes. If a flight left the gate 30 minutes late due to cargo loading, chances are it was still arriving at the destination on time or a couple of minutes late. So delays under 30 min were easy to recover from, but lengthier mtc delays were a little tougher.
I also noticed that when you look at connections, in the old banking PHL hub, if a flight was 1 hour late, chances were the entire flight would misconnect because they missed that bank. With the new rolling hub, if the flight was an hour late, chances are you would only misconnect 4-5 flights. Generally, if you missed the early connection, there was another flight in about 2-3 hours.
The new CLT banks really crunch in a lot of airplanes all day long. As usual, CLT has been doing a tremendous job of moving airplanes.
FLL has been doing an outstanding job with their new flyiing. So far, the movement of people and airplanes between the international concourse and our domestic concourse has been smooth. I hope the momentum continues as we transition into more and more caribbean flying. the transition of FLL from an out station to a focus city has been smooth and is a real credit to the employees there. On a normal day FLL handled a lot of traffic and their infrastructure was strained. With the additional flying and customer loads, the staff at FLL has done a tremendous job.
DCA is another hot spot in the system, and while they are approx 200 agents short, they are still performing very well. Once again, a tremendous tribute to the employees of that station. With the transition of express flying back to mainline, they have been able to perform very well with minimal delays.
Lastly, JAX. What a tremendous job they did with the exit from the SuperBowl. They were booked for 102% load factor and flights were going out at 98%. Delays were minimal, if any. All of this and they handeled 6 extra section flights to help with the on slaught of Super Bowl attendees. There were 8 flights that left the gate late with delays ranging from 1 min to a max of 16 minutes. Total delay time was 61 minutes. What an awesome job performance by the employees of JAX.
Next station for an on slaught of travelers will be MSY and the partiers returning from Mardi Gras.
To all the employees that made this HUGE schedule change and major events a success, BRAVO! Your efforts have not gone unnoticed by your fellow employees. Keep up the great work!
