Hi kids. It’s time for another episode of “Ask Cranky.” Hooray! This time, the question comes from Florida, or as a friend of mine calls it, “America’s wang.” It’s a great question.

Last week, I finally got the chance to try out Melbourne’s much-acclaimed addition of US Airways. We were caught in the nasty weather up in New York which severely delayed our flight home, but somehow managed to pull up to a gate in Charlotte at 9:53, hopeful of making our 10:09 connection to Melbourne. We tore through the airport and arrived at 10:03, only to find the boarding door closed and our plane pushing back (The only flight to leave even close to on-time during our entire trip…).

My question is about this practice of leaving early when connecting passengers are in the terminal. They had to know our flight had landed — why not hold the plane until at least the scheduled departure time? I know the days of holding a flight for additional passengers are long gone, but surely just waiting until the scheduled departure time is an option?

(As usual, the airline refused reimbursement for our hotel expenses because our original delay was weather-related. Although I’d argue the real reason for our stranding was the early departure of our connecting flight.)

Ryan A – Melbourne, Florida

This is without question one of the most frustrating things that can happen to a traveler. For an airline, it becomes an operations call on how to handle the situation, and unfortunately, it sounds like you got on the wrong side of this one.

The bad news is that they don’t technically owe you anything, because the rules specifically state that you have to be at the gate 15 minutes prior to departure, even if it’s their fault that you weren’t there.

So why would they have left early? There are a couple of reasons that come to mind, one more likely than others.

The more likely scenario is that they had a ton of people trying to get on that flight from earlier delays or cancellations. As soon as that 15 minute mark hit, they were free to cancel confirmed seats and put other people onboard. Sucks for you, great for them.

The less likely but still quite possible scenario is that there could have been extenuating circumstances. Maybe the weather was rolling in and they had to get out early to beat it. Maybe the pilots were dangerously close to timing out on their duty day so they wanted to get on their way.

If neither of those were the case, then they probably would have looked at your arrival time and held the plane for just a couple minutes. After all, that plane was spending the night in Melbourne, so being a couple of minutes late wouldn’t have impacted any other connections.

The great US Airways/Delta slot swap is back in the news, and the airlines are now willing to offer some concessions to the DOT to get the deal approved. These aren’t nearly what the DOT was asking for, but we’ll see if they’re in a bargaining mood or not. Here’s how it now works.

We all remember the original deal, right? US Airways would give Delta 125 slot pairs at LaGuardia in exchange for 42 slot pairs at Washington/National along with route authorities to fly to Sao Paulo and Tokyo from other cities in the system. And yes, I believe Delta is still demanding that Pete Rose rookie card as well. The DOT came back and said that the deal was only going to fly if they divested 14 slot pairs in Washington and 20 in New York. Now the airlines have come back with their own response.

Once this deal is done, US Airways says it will sell 5 slot pairs in Washington to JetBlue. Delta will sell 15 slot pairs in New York, 5 each to Spirit, WestJet, and AirTran. That’s obviously not exactly what the DOT was looking for here.

The DOT’s biggest concerns were in Washington, and US Airways isn’t even getting close to what the DOT wants there. I have a feeling New York is a non-issue here. That divestiture seems like it should be enough. But Washington is a tough one. Meanwhile, Southwest is making some serious noise about the deal demanding that even more be given up. (Translation: “We want in”)

Why would US Airways and Delta agree to give these up? Well the deal will be beneficial for both. Apparently, it will be beneficial enough that it’s worth forfeiting a handful of slots. Besides, they’re able to pick and choose who gets the slots, so the sale can do the least harm to them.

WestJet is a no-brainer for New York. They can only fly north of the border, keeping them out of Delta’s hair for the most part. Spirit being the ultra low cost carrier that it is, is probably less of a competitive threat than some others out there. It’s hilarious to see AirTran in the mix since they have been a giant thorn in Delta’s side for years. But Airtran may very likely have been the best option left under the DOT’s rules that it goes to someone with a very small or non-existent presence at the airport. In DC, JetBlue is probably a smart move as well. Maybe some flights to New York or Boston? They wouldn’t be able to offer many flights so the impact would be limited.

The key is that no airline gets more than 5 slots, so there’s not a ton they can do to make a massive impact from a competitive standpoint. I also fully expect to see these flights go in markets that already have plenty of competition, but if it satisfies the DOT, then it’s probably a relatively small price to pay.

I just have to wonder if this will satisfy the DOT. It’s a significant cut compared what they had proposed originally, but you would hope they’ll be open to negotiation. This seems like the final offer to me. Either it goes through or the deal blows up.

Considering how much discussion we’ve had here on the blog about delays lately, I thought it might be a good time to dig in and review the latest Air Travel Consumer Report. This one covers January travel and it really wasn’t awful, surprisingly. January weather was bad, but February weather was awful. I’m not looking forward to seeing that one. Let’s get started.

On Time Performance
As usual, Hawaiian was the best, though it couldn’t crack 90 percent on time. It helps to do most of your flying around the mostly weather-free islands, so I always ignore their results. Alaska was next with 85.8 percent on time, probably showing that the Pacific Northwest has had a relatively mild winter this year. Then comes United with 83.7 percent, a great showing. But wait, we don’t know that for sure. Nearly half United’s flights are actually operated by another airline as United Express. (This doesn’t even count codesharing with alliance partners.) But those results all fall under that operating airline.

So SkyWest, which does a fair bit of flying for United, posted only a 74.6 percent rating, but that won’t show up in United’s numbers. That’s why I find these numbers hard to use and hard to trust. So how can we break these down and get more meaningful info? Well we can’t do it precisely, but we can start to approximate. Take a look at SkyWest again. They do most of their flying for either United or Delta and we don’t know how they did for each. How can we figure that out? They do break it down by arrival airport, so we can dig in that way.

In Denver, SkyWest had 78.4 percent of flights arrive on time (United had 88.6 percent). At LAX it was 79.6 percent (87.2 percent for United) and in Chicago it was 69.5 percent (84.2 percent for United). In San Francisco, SkyWest had a dreadful 53.2 percent while United had 76.9 percent. It’s a safe bet that the vast majority of those flights were operated for United.

On the other hand, SkyWest had an 81.9 percent on time arrival rate in Salt Lake compared to Delta’s even better 89.7 percent. Those were mostly operated for Delta. What does this tell us? It shows that no matter who you’re flying, regionals tend to operate fewer flights on time than the majors. The reason is that when the weather ramps up, smaller airplanes tend to get delayed first because fewer people are inconvenienced than if a big plane gets delayed. But it shows that the numbers you see are certainly deceiving. The DOT needs to change this.

Consistently Late Flights
Here’s a great reason why these numbers are again rough. Hawaiian may have had the best on time performance, but guess what? Of all the flights that were delayed at least 80 percent of the time in January, a full 40% were operated by Hawaiian. So they may have good on time performance in general, but don’t try to tell that to all the people stuck on those six flight numbers from the mainland.

But just because a plane is consistently late doesn’t mean it’s the worst thing around. For example, a whopping 87.1 percent of the time, Delta flight 6578 from Kansas City to JFK (operated by Comair) was delayed by an average of 34 minutes. That’s bad, but it’s not nearly as bad as Skywest 5942 between San Francisco and Sacramento. That flight was operated as United Express, and it was “only” late 83.87 percent of the time. But guess what? It was late an average of 92 minutes. You could drive there faster.

Flight Cancellations
When we look at flight cancellations, we can really see the plan to impact regional flights over mainline flights in place. Regional carriers filled the top 6 spots when it came to cancellation percentage with Pinnacle taking the cake with a 4.1 percent cancellation rate. US Airways was the top mainline carrier with 3 percent, but again, when you fill in the blanks with express carriers, it might change things entirely. We just don’t have that kind of visibility, especially since their two wholly-owned carriers (Piedmont and PSA) aren’t included in the data at all.

Ramp Delays Over 3 Hours
In January, there were only two flights with ramp delays over 4 hours, both Delta flights. The first was from Ft Myers to LaGuardia. That flight diverted to Harrisburg to wait out the weather. It waited for a long friggin’ time, but it did eventually go. With the new rule, this flight would simply have canceled in Harrisburg and some alternate mode of transportation would have had to be arranged, probably a bus.

The second was a flight from Charlotte to Atlanta. They were delayed coming out of Charlotte because of bad weather in Atlanta. In fact, there were a bunch of weather diversions into Charlotte so the gates were all filled and they couldn’t get back to the gate. They now have a procedure set up to get people off on the ramp.

Moving down to 3 hour delays, there were 21 flights that were delayed over that limit for a .004% rate out of all flights. Delta had the most with 8.

Mishandled Bags
I really hate this number. I’ve written about this in the distant past, but let me refresh your memories. The mishandled bag number is the number of lost bags per 1,000 passengers. What a stupid number. So one month you could have 1,000 passengers that check no bags and the next they could check 3 bags each. The number needs to be the number of lost bags per 1,000 checked bags. I won’t even bother here.

Complaints
This is another rough measure, because it’s only complaints that reach the DOT. People don’t generally complain to the DOT unless the airline hasn’t helped them. So this is a better measure of what airlines aren’t helping their customers (or which airlines have the most irrational customers) than it is a measure of which airlines people have complaints with.

The metric shows the number of complaints per hundred thousand passengers, so for some of these airlines, the numbers are so small that year over year comparisons aren’t great. For example, in January 2008, Atlantic Southeast had .96 complaints per hundred thousand passengers, but this January it plunged to .30 complaints. Hooray! Oh wait. They had a total of 3 complaints for the entire month, down from 9 the year before. That’s such a small number that it’s hard to really draw any conclusions.

The other problem here is how complaints are allocated. If we look at the breakdown, there were 927 total complaints in January. Of those, 109 were related to reservations/ticketing/boarding. It’s going to be hard for Atlantic Southeast to get any complaints in that category since they don’t handle those functions. They have a bunch in baggage as well. What if it’s going from an express flight to a mainline flight? Whose fault is that? If the mainline carriers handles the ground handling for both, then it should be the mainline carrier, but if it’s tied to a flight number, it may fall to the express carrier.

Again, it’s the problem of operational carrier vs marketing carrier that clouds things here. We really need to have everyone show their numbers by marketing carrier to really make things fair.

Well, it happened. The British Airways cabin crews did indeed go on strike and that’s bad for BA, bad for the cabin crews, and most importantly, bad for passengers. The good news, however, is that the communication has been truly excellent throughout the entire process. It’s particularly good when you compare it to Air France and its upcoming possible strike. They’ve really blown it.

Let’s start with BA. There’s no question that the strike sucks. A lot of flights have been canceled, but according to BA, all flights that were planned to operate have operated. The cabin crew’s union, however, says that it’s mass chaos. Who to believe? Probably the airline. For example, Unite says “By 2pm, only one flight to JFK airport had departed – normally there are five.” That’s not true. there are normally five flights per day on Saturday but only 3 are scheduled before 2p. Two of those were canceled so yes, only 1 flight operated, but the last two flights which were scheduled after 2p operated as well. I believe that was the plan.

BA has also done a very good job with its policies here. Anyone who wanted to change or get a refund was welcome to do so without penalty long before they even knew if the strike would actually happen. They have been putting out flight status information 8 full days in advance so you can really know if your flight can be expected to go or not and make alternate plans with plenty of advance notice. We have a Cranky Concierge client flying on the 29th and his flight is going so far. It’s just nice to know that the information is there and they’ve been able to maintain their schedule.

BA CEO Willie Walsh is putting out daily video updates on the strike talking about how things are going (well, in his opinion). The video communication adds a nice touch, I think.

The airline has even gone as far as buying Google keywords. Search for “ba strike” and you’ll see this:

That takes you to a page with BA strike updates. They are also putting updates out via Twitter. It’s been an impressive effort in an awful situation.

Now let’s talk about Air France. It’s just pathetic in comparison. Air France cabin crews have said they’ll strike March 28-31, perfectly timed to overlap with the second half of the BA strike. (French and British cooperating?!? The world is ending.) So how is Air France handling this? They aren’t.

If you go to their website, you won’t even find a mention of the strike, at least not anywhere I’ve found. We have another Cranky Concierge client flying on Air France on May 31, so we decided to look into the possibility of pushing the trip one day to happen after the strike.

First, I tried to tweet Air France to see if they were allowing changes for people traveling during the strike period. I never received a response. So I called Air France a couple days later and they informed me that since they don’t know if the strike will happen, they aren’t allowing any changes. If the strike happens, then you can change. Something tells me that if the strike happens, things will be much worse for passengers on Air France than they have been for BA passengers. Then again, maybe French passengers are used to it since striking is a national tradition.

So, kudos to British Airways for dealing with an awful situation quite well and Air France, boo on you.

San Francisco Targets LAX In Fight for Connecting Travelers – BNET
SFO wants Aussies and Kiwis to connect there instead of LAX. Hilarity ensues.

Real Estate Developer Rick Caruso Eyes Expansion Into Airports – BNET
The man behind The Grove development in LA is now eyeing airports to improve shops and dining.

using miles for wedding travel – AntiBride.com
If you’re having your wedding, it’s a great time to try and use miles.

FAA Slaps American with $787,500 Fine For Lax Maintenance – BNET
The FAA is trying to step things up when it comes to enforcement. That latest is an American fine.

Pittsburgh’s European Connection Will Cost the City $5 Million – BNET
Pittsburgh is paying through the nose to keep Delta’s struggling flight to Paris at the airport.

The Cranky Flier: Booking Beyond Price – Sparksheet
I guest posted on the Sparksheet about the difficulty of encouraging people to book beyond price. (Hint: distribution makes life hard)