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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But with airports running limited flights or shut down completely, the options narrow. On Thursday, the flight dispatcher's scorecard shows that all passengers heading to Boston are delayed by a total of nearly 95,000 minutes, or an average of 90 minutes. The flight with the most delayed minutes might get landing dibs on the others. By the time the day is over, American has canceled 219 flights in all, about 9.5% of its daily total. Other airlines grappling with the weather have nixed 5,800 more. Thousands of flyers are stranded. This has been a mixed bag of weather, which complicates things even further--airlines need to apply different deicing fluids for snow or ice. On Feb. 12, freezing rain turned into snow and sleet in Atlanta by around 3 a.m. "Atlanta has ice pellets," I overhear someone say. "Nobody is moving a wheel." By 9 a.m. or 10 a.m, the main weather system hits Charlotte, and it snows all day. Snow begins in Raleigh, N.C., at noon and lasts until about 5 p.m., when it turns to freezing rain. Snow begins in Washington at about 6 p.m. or 7 p.m. It snows all night and continues into the next morning.

But at the operations center, Campbell gives his crew good marks in managing the storm. "We haven't had any 'Oh sh-t's where we've stranded customers in the airports because we blew the forecast or reacted too slowly," says Campbell. I ask Schulz if he has ever canceled a flight he was scheduled to take. No, he replies, but he's witnessed the fruits of his labor: "I've walked into the airport thinking, I'm the guy who did that. I hope they don't know it's me." I inquire about my chances of getting home the next morning. "Hey Billy, what have we done to New York tomorrow?" he asks Szendrey. The expectation is that LaGuardia will operate on a limited basis, meaning some large fraction of the planned flights won't happen. How many? "A quarter to a third of the program," replies Szendrey, a New York native. My flight still seems good to go.

This is of no comfort to customers like Aileen Cahill, who still couldn't get out of New York during the storm. Cahill is an airline executive's dream: a 2 million-mile platinum-level frequent flyer. But even she has had to absorb her share of the frustration in the post-9/11 flight economy. Passengers now bear nearly all the risk of empty seats, fuel prices, security and weather. Nearly all tickets purchased these days are nonrefundable--if you don't show because you're stuck in traffic, you lose the money. On the other hand, if the carrier cancels the flight or strands you in Boise, too bad. "If you screw up, you pay," says aviation consultant Michael Boyd of Boyd Group International. "If they screw up, you are supposed to understand it." Cahill is even more pointed. "You need a Purple Heart instead of a frequent-flyer card," she says.

Consider Rule 240, for instance. It's part of the contract of carriage, the fine-print legalese that specifies what the carrier's responsibility is to you, the ticket holder. Not much, it turns out. Every airline has a form of Rule 240, and years ago it promised that if, say, Pan Am canceled your flight, it would switch you to TWA or Eastern if it couldn't get you where you were going within four hours of your scheduled arrival.

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