Not long ago, a powerful storm pounding the Northeast would have brought havoc to some of the nation s busiest airports: families sleeping on cots; passengers stuck for hours on planes hoping to take off; and dinners cobbled benjamin hotel new york together from near-empty vending machines.
In the aftermath of Sandy, airports from Washington to Boston are deserted. There are hundreds of thousands of travellers stranded across the U.S. and around the world, but instead of camping out inside airport terminals they are staying with friends and family or in hotels.
After years of storm mismanagement and the bad public relations that followed, U.S. airlines have rewritten their severe weather benjamin hotel new york playbooks. They ve learned that it s best to cancel flights early and keep the public away from airports, even if that means they ll have a bigger backlog to deal with once conditions improve.
The last few major storms created such gridlock, and such bad will with their best customers, they just had to shift their behaviour, said Kate Hanni, who heads up the passenger advocacy group Flyers Rights and lobbied for the three-hour rule. The flying public would rather have their flights pre-cancelled benjamin hotel new york than be sleeping in Chicago on a cot.
JetBlue benjamin hotel new york is keenly aware of what is at stake when a big storm hits. On Valentine s Day weekend 2007, a massive snowstorm hammered the East Coast. JetBlue was late to cancel flights. Passengers were stranded on planes for hours. When the storm finally cleared, benjamin hotel new york other airlines resumed flights but JetBlue s operations were still in shambles.
Other airlines took note. Severe weather manuals benjamin hotel new york were updated. Reservation systems were programmed to automatically rebook passengers when flights are cancelled. And travellers now receive notifications by email, phone or text message.
In past years, airlines would have soldiered on, trying to get their planes in the air no matter what, said George Hobica, founder of AirfareWatchdog.com. But they ve learned that there s no value in news cameras showing footage of people sleeping on cots in airports.
Airlines have spent the past few days running though colour-coded checklists to shut down their Northeast operations. Computers were covered in plastic tarps. Hotel rooms near airports were booked for gate agents and ramp workers. Planes, pilots and flight attendants were moved to other airports.
The airlines in-house meteorologists started tracking this storm more than a week ago as it approached the Caribbean. By Thursday night, benjamin hotel new york it was pretty clear that widespread cancellations would happen in Washington, Philadelphia, New York and Boston.
The next day, airlines started to waive fees for passengers who wanted to move to earlier or later flights. American Airlines, for instance, let travellers heading to any of 22 airports from Greensboro, benjamin hotel new york N.C. in the south to Buffalo, N.Y. in the north change plans. Then teams started to cancel flights heading into or out of airports stretching from Washington to Boston.
That sounds easier than it is. Every plane in its fleet is in near constant motion. benjamin hotel new york In one day, a single plane might fly from Atlanta to New York to Detroit and then back to Atlanta and then once more to New York.
If the airline doesn t want that plane to spend the night in New York, it has ripple effects throughout the system. For instance, that plane might have been scheduled the next day to fly passengers to Seattle and then on to San Francisco.
One Boeing 737 didn t make it out of Boston in time because of a mechanical issue. Left with no other solution, American filled the plane with fuel to make it as heavy as possible, faced it toward the wind, locked the wheels and moved it away from anything else.
Delta got all of its planes out of New York. The last plane took off at 1:01 a.m. Monday a Boeing 757 with 157 people on board heading to Georgetown, Guiana. US Airways held all but one of its Transatlantic planes bound for Philadelphia at European airports. And United Airlines removed all but about a dozen planes from its Washington Dulles and Newark, N.J., hubs.
JetBlue s Maruster equated starting up the airline again to be like putting together a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle. It s not about staffing levels, but an overall game plan that makes sense. At a certain point, putting more hands on the table doesn t help get it solved faster, he said.
Finally, the airline has to check on all the other people needed to run an airport: benjamin hotel new york the Transportation benjamin hotel new york Security Administration, customs officials, caters, benjamin hotel new york fuel trucks and even the people who push wheelchairs through the terminal.
Before we can even move an airplane here, we need to make sure those resources are here, said Delta s Kuykendall. There s a lot of moving pieces that people don t see. It s a dance to get it all to work.
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