• 24

  May

  2007

  FAA To Let Airlines Take the Long Way Home

  Filed under: Delays/Cancellations, Safety/Security, Weather;

  In case you were wondering, no, I am not above using a Supertramp song title in my subject line to lure readers. (Would that really lure anyone?) Anyway . . .
  
  The FAA came out with a groundbreaking program yesterday that will help speed up summer travel. In a nutshell, when there’s bad weather around, those flights that won’t be going through the bad weather won’t be delayed. Um, did I say groundbreaking? I may have to take that one back. How was this NOT happening before?!
  
  Here’s a little more detail. Let’s say you’re in Chicago and a line of storms stands between you and your destination in Las Vegas. In the past, you would have had a ground delay program and you would have been stuck until cleared. Now, they’re saying that if you’re willing to load up on fuel, you can fly around the storms and then you won’t have a delay. Again, common sense, right?
  
  Last year they did this for 7 northeast airports, but this year they’ll expand to 18 total airports including some in the Midwest. So is this one of the first flights to take advantage of the new policy? Thanks to FlightAware, you can see it went way south to get around the weather. (This shot shows the weather after it had moved further east.)
  
  I don’t know. It seems like I’ve done this many times in the past. What is so different here?

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  1 Comment

One Response to “FAA To Let Airlines Take the Long Way Home”

1. 

   Sheila June 1st, 2007 at 7:24 pm

   That does make sense.

   My question is, if I’m on one of those flights that has to fly around a storm, will that add extra miles to my frequent flier account? ;-)

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