This flight delay from American Airlines was extra annoying

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In the past few days, I’ve been reviewing a series of flights that I recently took and some of the lounges that I visited, and in a couple of reviews I touched upon the fact that my flight from Dallas/Ft. Worth to Palm Springs was delayed.

What I haven’t mentioned so far is that one aspect of the delay was especially annoying.

A bit of background

Because I like to lock in great deals as soon as I find them and because I like to book my flights well ahead of time, I’m often at the mercy of schedule changes.

Most of the time, any schedule changes that I have to deal with aren’t particularly bad, but on this trip a series of schedule changes saw my layover time in Dallas increase from 2 hours 35 minutes to 3 hours 50 minutes and then, finally, 4 hours 45 minutes.

After a 9+ hour transatlantic flight, that’s not ideal, but I’ve been booking flights for long enough to know that this was a risk I was running when I booked my flights 9 months out.

The first delay

A couple of days before I flew to Dallas, American Airlines suffered a minor operational meltdown thanks to bad weather in the DFW area, and as seems to happen whenever a US carrier has any kind of bad weather to deal with, American Airlines failed to get its act together in any kind of timely manner.

What this meant was that three days after the bad weather had messed with the American Airlines schedule, the airline was still delaying flights.

My flight from Dallas to Palm Springs wasn’t showing a delay when my transatlantic flight landed, but after an hour in the Flagship Lounge, I got an alert on my phone to tell me to expect a 1 hour 20 minute delay.

My originally anticipated layover time had now gone from 2 hours 35 minutes to a little over 6 hours.

Ok, these things can happen, and as a seasoned traveler I know that this kind of thing happens all the time and it’s just something you just have to roll with.

On the day, I was tired and irritable, but I still knew that this wasn’t a major issue (an 80 minute delay is nothing) so I just tried to get some work done to take my mind off the inordinate amount of time I was spending in the lounge (things could have been a lot worse, I could have been stuck in a gate area!)

The second delay

This was the delay that snapped my temper.

Most frequent flyers will tell you that it’s always a good idea to have several flight/airport apps on your phone to help you make sure that you have the best information available about the flights you’re taking, so I have a number of these apps on my phone.

FlightAware is one such app, and it can be an especially useful tool thanks to its ‘where’s my plane’ feature which shows you the progress of the aircraft that’s meant to be flying you to your destination.

Sometimes that aircraft will already be at the airport, but often, it will be flying in from elsewhere and you can track its movements all the way to your location (this feature can help you predict delays before most airlines notify you of them).

Knowing that American Airlines was still struggling to get its flight network back on track, I was tracking the inbound aircraft that was scheduled to fly to Palm Springs, and just to make sure that FlightAware wasn’t accidentally feeding me the wrong information, I checked the details with the agents in the Flagship Lounge.

There was no mistake. The flight I was tracking was being operated by the aircraft scheduled to fly me to Palm Springs and coincidentally, it was due to arrive at a gate that I could see from where I was sitting.

The aircraft I was waiting for landed, and slowly taxied its way towards its allotted gate (my departure gate), and as I watched it gradually coming to a standstill, my phone pinged with a notification from American Airlines telling me that my flight was delayed a further 75 minutes.

As I had just watched my scheduled aircraft pull up to the gate and as we were still 45 minutes aways from the last scheduled departure time we had been given, this second delay seemed more than a little odd.

A quick check showed that my flight was no longer departing from the gate I was watching and that the aircraft that had just arrived was no longer the aircraft scheduled to fly me to Palm Springs. It had been reassigned to operate a different flight departing in an hour.

Now, I was annoyed.

Yes, American Airlines can claim that bad weather a few days ago was the reason for my original flight delay, and as ridiculous as it is that year after year the airline faces the same weather issues and yet never gets any better at dealing with them, I can just about live with that.

If I can’t live with that I probably shouldn’t be flying with any kind of frequency as I’d just setting myself up for disappointment.

For this latest delay to happen, however, someone in AA operations had to take the decision to reassign the aircraft that was due to fly me to Palm Springs.

That’s not a weather delay (which is what the American Airlines agents I spoke to insisted on calling it). That’s a calculated move on the part of the airline which is making the choice to delay me further.

Of course, there was nothing I could do about this except to tell myself that getting annoyed with the agents in the lounge was not in any way helpful, and to put in a call to the resort at which I was due to stay to tell them I wouldn’t be arriving before midnight.

Eventually, almost 8 hours after I had landed in Dallas and after a delay approaching 3 hours, my flight to Palms Springs took off.

By this point I was too tired to be angry or annoyed, but as I started taking notes for that flight review, I made a further note (a mental one) to avoid any future connections in Dallas if at all possible because when things go wrong there, time and time again American Airlines takes an age to recover.

How do you view that second delay? Weather related or something else?