Airport Confidential: Inside the Strange World of Airline Cancellations

These are the men and women who decide if your flight takes off on time or leaves you stranded

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Photograph by Brent Humphreys for TIME

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There are three broad dimensions to the task of canceling a flight: customers, crews and jets. Customers come first, right? Not exactly. "Something may be fully optimized for customers [initially], but it's going to destroy you the next day because you are going to have crews totally out of position," says Campbell.

The crew issue is knottier than it might appear because each crew member is on the clock. The pilots, for example, can fly only 100 hours a month. And this year new Federal Aviation Administration rules requiring more pilot rest time between flights went into effect. At American and other unionized carriers, the flight attendants' contracts also impose limitations.

Jets become pieces in a large-scale chess game. Where do you position them? Consider JetBlue, which keeps 20 to 35 jets overnight in Boston. With a storm on the horizon, it must decide whether to keep the jets in place or move most of them and their crews away from the weather. If JetBlue can't restore normal operations in a 24-hour period, it may call a time-out. In early January, for instance, a big storm caused the carrier to pull the plug on most operations for about 17 hours to get jets and crews into the proper position. "When you take a 1,009-flight-a-day operation and grind it to a halt when it's supposed to be perpetually in motion," says JetBlue's Maruster, "getting it back to its original status takes time."

Some flights have an easier time getting a pass. International flights have a high priority. So do domestic flights that are ferrying crews, particularly to those international flights, because if a crew can't get to New York City, the Paris flight gets scrubbed. On the other hand, you may be out of luck if your flight is full of "terminators," airline jargon for travelers who aren't connecting. And if you are flying from a busy hub to a busy hub with frequent service, say Dallas to New York, your odds of a cancellation also go up since it will be easier to rebook you. The carriers are known to have their own hit lists too, although if they keep grounding the same flights month after month, customers will eventually take their business elsewhere.

This being a for-profit business, weight is also given to the fares paid. Which is to say that all passengers are not created equal. A jet full of highly discounted leisure flyers scores lower in the Cancellator's calculations than one loaded with full-fare business types. "There's a kind of a point system, an optimizing system," says Campbell. "Like a lot of businesses, the more you can take care of high-value customers, the better return you get on it." That explains why a flight from Dallas to Detroit, where average fares are above $500, might take precedence over a flight to Orlando, where the figure is more like $300.

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