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Four Decide When Snow Cancels American's Flights

Posted on: Tuesday, 21 February 2006, 00:00 CST

By Melanie Trottman

American Airlines has 80,000 employees who help make flights possible. It has four who cancel them. Danny Burgin is one of those four.

Early last Sunday, as a record-setting blizzard moved up the East Coast, paralyzing travel via roads, railroads and airports with as much as 27 inches of snow, Burgin arrived for work at American Airlines' Fort Worth, Texas, control center and took a deep breath.

It was 6 a.m., and already nearly 24,000 customers, originally scheduled to fly that Saturday, had seen their flights canceled. Facing Burgin, 55, as he sat in front of a horseshoe-shaped command post, was a bank of computer screens full of blinking lights and data streams, feeding him constantly updated information. Tracking hundreds of flights across American's U.S. and international maps, he had to help decide which should be canceled or rerouted. But first he needed more information.

Burgin, who is a control-center manager, began making phone calls - to American Airlines meteorologists in Fort Worth and in Andover, Mass., and to LaGuardia and Kennedy airports in New York - and firing off questions. Are employees getting in to work? How many runways are cleared? How's pilot visibility?

Airline operations can be disrupted by anything from mechanical failures to political upheaval. But weather is the biggest cause of cancellations and delays. Compared with thunderstorms and other weather events, snowstorms can actually be simpler to handle; they're usually easier to predict and airline crews can work around them quickly with de-icers and snowplows.

Last weekend's blizzard, though, walloped the East Coast with an intensity no one had anticipated, shutting down airports earlier and for longer than expected, and affecting hundreds of thousands of travelers.

Planning for the storm had begun Thursday evening at American. As weather forecasts warned of the approaching storm - the snowfall was pegged at only 10 to 12 inches at one point - control-center staff talked with American station managers in New York, Boston and Chicago, cities that were expected to take the brunt. One decision reached on Saturday: They'd shut down Northeastern operations beginning that night, in advance of the storm, with the hope of getting back to a full schedule by Monday morning.

At 9 a.m. Saturday, American began canceling flights scheduled for that night and the next day, giving the airline more time to notify passengers and rebook them.

In Boston the airline was short one plane after American was forced to cancel a Saturday night flight to Boston from Turks and Caicos. To even out operations, it canceled a Sunday flight from Boston to Miami - and created another dilemma to solve.

Burgin, who has been doing this job for 12 years, is part of the central command for all flight cancellations and reschedulings at the world's largest airline. American and its commuter carriers serve 250 cities worldwide, with more than 1,000 planes and 3,900 daily flights. Decisions by people in Burgin's position make or break business trips and save or ruin vacations.

Canceled and delayed flights are causing bigger headaches than ever as demand for air travel soars and passengers pack planes at record levels. Last July, American filled 85.1 percent of its seats overall, the most ever in that month, which meant more planes flying with every seat occupied. JetBlue Airways filled 91.1 percent of its seats that month, even as it added 27 percent more capacity. Through October, the domestic airline industry continued to fill seats at a faster rate than it added them, according to the latest data from the Department of Transportation.

Meanwhile, some airlines have been reducing flights on certain routes in order to cut costs. Schedules filed for this April show a 3.9 percent reduction in domestic capacity from a year earlier, according to the Air Transport Association. Fewer planes with fewer spare seats leave reduced options for rebooking travelers. That means longer delays and more inconvenient connections. Add it all up, and more passengers feel the pain with every canceled or delayed flight.

"There are fewer empty seats in which to put passengers spilling over from other flights," said Robert Shumsky, a professor at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business who wrote his dissertation on problems with air-traffic control. "My feeling is that you better get used to it."

For Burgin and his peers, this means more pressure; each decision can have a greater ripple effect. At American, canceling one flight can disrupt the travel plans of up to 247 passengers, with missed connections and other headaches throughout the network for hours or days.

Recently developed computer software helps American do a better job of analyzing traffic flow in the network. That enables staffers to more efficiently adjust flight schedules and minimize disruptions to passengers.

With the click of a mouse, for example, staffers can find out how many passengers will miss connections when flights are canceled or delayed. Staffers can then quickly determine what changes to make in the system to affect the fewest number of passengers. For example, they can juggle a few delayed takeoffs so that the flight with the most connecting passengers can arrive earlier.

"We're just in a whole new ballgame, where we have to make a fundamental change in how we do things," says Dave Seymour, the vice president of operations control and planning at US Airways. In the past, for example, a mechanical problem might have meant canceling a flight; now, with fewer backup flights available, the airline may decide on a lengthy delay instead.

Federal Aviation Administration records delays as flights arriving at least 15 minutes beyond scheduled arrival time. In 2004, there were 86.5 million minutes of delays - including those for weather - at an estimated $4.8 billion in direct operating costs for U.S. airlines, according to estimates by the Air Transport Association.

Last Sunday proved to be a special test of airlines' ability to handle disruptions. The storm was not only the worst of the season, but one of the worst on record. Less than 30 percent of American's employees arrived for work at New York-area airports.

By 6:30 p.m. Sunday, American had canceled a total of 672 flights that had been scheduled from Saturday to Monday, 411 of them originally scheduled for Sunday. But because the airline had decided on many of those cancellations ahead of time, it didn't have many passengers stranded at its hubs, Burgin said.

Part of his task was to tweak the original plan to adapt to unfolding events. For example, instead of resuming operations in New England on Sunday evening, American held off flying until Monday. It did release two departures from New York airports Sunday - one to Zurich and one to London's Heathrow. (Airlines tend to give international flights priority over domestic ones, in part because they are more difficult to reschedule.) Burgin also had to cancel additional flights at New York's LaGuardia airport Monday because of 10- to 12-foot-high snow piles that were blocking access to five American gates.

By 3 p.m. Monday, as Burgin was wrapping up his shift, American's operations in New England were back in full swing. A Turkish Airlines plane that had skidded off a runway at JFK on Sunday had been removed. American's operations in all of New York were up and running, though delays at LaGuardia were averaging one hour, and delays at Newark, N.J., 25 minutes.

After such a big storm, it would take at least another day to get all the kinks worked out of the system.

Source: Sunday Gazette - Mail; Charleston, W.V.

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