Just some FACTS for a change.
1) None of the forecast models predicted the ICE event to last as long as it did. Rain and snow events are much less a challenge as operating in an ICE event. By the time the forecasted models were changed, we were already behind the 8 ball.
2) The people making decisions related to East flying are the same people that had been making them prior to the merger. Tempe knows that there is a lot of expertise in the OCC and gives them a lot of leway when it comes to decision making.
3) Ask any veteran East employee with a memory - WE DO THIS EVERY YEAR! Ice storms in CLT. Blizzards in PHL. Last year we had a very similar incident in the North East. We cancelled over 400 flights, on the day of departure. These storms are very complicated to predict and a temperature variance of just a few degress makes all the difference in the world. You will either have a rain event or an ice event.
4) Part of the problem with recovery on Sat had to do with crews out of position. When you have a major crew base in PHL closed nearly all day and crew bases in DCA, LGA and BOS effected, crews are out of position. Compounding the problem were crews that were stuck at the airport in CLT - sleeping in airplanes because there were no hotel rooms available. Since these crews were never in hotel rooms, they were not legal to fly - which is an understandable safety issue. The CLT and PIT crew bases would not have the resources to "recrew" the entire airline.
5) The wait and hold times on the phone is an issue I am sure we could have planned better. Once the call volume spiked, additional staffing should have been called in. My question is, how many of you would have come to work, on your off day, or extended your shift knowing that you were going to be screamed at all day? Same with airport staffing. Sick calls spike during and after these events - who wants to come to work and deal with all that stress.
6) I can guarantee you that every senior manager in the company has been involved in the system recovery all weekend. No one is out on the golf course in Tempe. Managers, Directors, VP's have been in touch with all stations trying to assist in recovery.
7) When the PR person talks about 100K customers is somewhat true. When you cancel nearly 35-40% of your flying one day, and another 25% the next (my estimates), you are dealing with a lot of customers with interupted travel. When the system load factor is already at 90%+, there is not a lot of wiggle room to reaccommodate people. Add to that the fact that every other airline was reporting similar load factors and cancellations, it is extremely hard to find protection.
8) Someone mentioned extra sections - Great! Love to have some extra sections. Where do we get the airplanes to run them? Crews? It is not as easy as one would think. As an added complexity, you have to look at maintenance requirements for the airplanes that were supposed to be in a Maintenance station. A larg number of our Maintenance Facitillities were impacted by weather. You have a very short window of opportunity to get required work accomplished. This could lead to additional aircraft out of service as Facitilies like CLT are overwhelmed with additional airplanes.
Final thoughts.....While my intention was not to make a postin to make excuses for this event, it was to put some factual information out there. Did we totally screw up? ABSOLUTELY. Everything from planning (or not planning) for the event to how we responded after the fact. Have we made similar mistakes in the past. You bet. Dealing with weather is not an exact science. At the first talk of inclement weather in PHL, we should know better then to try and run a full schedule. Our response to our customers was far from perfect and we need to refine how we react to these types of situations. When there are delays and cancellations we need a system in place to get people taken care of quickly.
We are not the only airline that had problems this weekend. We are not the only airline still recovering. CO is still having operational issues. DL, Air Tran, JetBlue, Southwest are still in the recovery phase of the storm. You can't have the number of cancellations that took place this weekend, with the number of customers affected - industry wide - and expect to recover immediately. We did run some extra sections today to try and assist in moving customers out of PHL and CLT. You do what you can with what you have available.
Hopefully this was a lesson learned by all.
Respectfully....