Happy New Year, everyone. Hopefully the last of you who were stranded after winter storms hit Europe and then the Northeast have finally made it back home. Now, the post-mortem begins. How did so many people get stranded and have such miserable holidays? Plenty of blame is already going around with many predictably pointing fingers at airlines and airports. But let’s be realistic here. As I wrote in a New York Times opinion piece last week, these types of situations are always going to happen no matter how well you prepare.

Don’t get me wrong. There are certainly going to be lessons learned from these storms. There always are, and they will help to make things run better in the future. But they are never going eliminate the pain that was felt in the last couple of weeks. These storms, especially the one in the Northeast, were not your normal storms. Normal storms are like the ones that raced through Denver, Minneapolis, and even Chicago last week without causing anything like the issues we saw in the Northeast and Europe. Though I suppose we should differentiate between the European storms and the Northeast storms because there was a big difference.

In Europe, they actually saw very little snow fall but then it melted and froze into ice. They just couldn’t get it cleared, so I actually think there is more blame to go around over there. I’m going to wait to get more info before diving further into that. But in the Northeast, they measured snowfall in feet. Combine that with high winds and you’ve got a recipe for disaster. That one was made far worse by the fact that the storm occurred during the busy holiday season. Had it happened in early December or mid-January, it would have been far easier to get all the people out of town because there’s just less demand at that time.

Since it happened in late December, it really became the perfect storm. You have planes packed full because of the holidays and you have a massive snow event that starts in the South and creeps up the coast, screwing up air traffic all along the way. So what could have been done better?

When the snow was coming down, it would have been virtually impossible to keep the runways clear and safe for any period of time at an airport like JFK. There’s nothing that you can do in a situation like that. You just have to wait for it to stop. But once it stops, then what?

Could JFK have had 100 extra snowplows ready to go above and beyond what the existing fleet already was doing? Yeah, but those plows don’t come cheap and they require operators, and that would mean higher costs to the airlines using the airport and ultimately higher costs for the traveler. And then those plows would just sit unused for 99 percent of the time. No business is programmed to be able to operate under a worst case scenario when a “storm of the decade” hits. It’s just not possible, especially in a low margin business like this one.

And what about the airlines? Could they have operated more flights and pressed more airplanes into service? Well they did operate more flights when they could and they were able to use larger airplanes in limited circumstances, but at this time of year the demand is so high for travel that the fleet is already pushed toward the edge of its capabilities. Should they have a fleet of 100 airplanes just sitting around to get people out after a storm? Oh please. That would add so much cost to operating an airline that they might as well just shut down.

If you want to place blame on anyone for the number of canceled flights and disruptions, then you should look no further than the Department of Transportation and Secretary Ray LaHood. That tarmac delay rule that everyone loves so much did nothing but encourage airlines to cancel flights. You’ll notice that domestic airlines seem to not have had any 3 hour delays but instead they had mass cancels unlike what might have happened before the rule. Foreign airlines, which do not fall under the rule today, sent airplanes and had them sit on the ground for hours and hours before they could get people off.

As you would expect, this is getting the attention of all the pro-rule people who are pushing for the rule to extend to international airlines. It’s too bad that will only make the problem worse. There are a bunch of issues when international flights are involved. Beyond just getting to the gate, you have to have a bunch of customs and immigration people come in to process the passengers. It was tough for people to get into the airport with that much snow. But the biggest problem is often the length of lead-time required.

We were helping some people at Cranky Concierge who sat on the ground for awhile at JFK. One was on a flight that was already canceled and rescheduled for a day later in Amman due to bad weather. Had the flight not been able to go this time, it likely would have canceled again and a lot of people would have had to wait longer to get a seat out of Amman. When the flight left Amman, the expectation was that JFK would be up and running again hours before the airplane arrived. That wasn’t the case because the weather turned out to have a significantly greater impact than predicted.

If the rule goes into effect for international flights, those flights will likely just cancel as a precaution instead of risking the massive fines the DOT has proposed. And if you ask the people on those airplanes, I bet most would rather sit on the ramp than not get to the US for days. (Our client felt that way.)

So how could things improve? I’m sure there’s something around international flights that can be changed so that the ramp delays aren’t so extreme. But I don’t know details of exactly what happened yet so it’s hard to know exactly what that might be.

I keep hearing about communication being an issue for a lot of people, and that is where I hope the airlines can focus the most. The airlines have done a good job of getting people to use their online tools, but those only go so far. (Though I do have to give Delta huge kudos for that @DeltaAssist Twitter account. Those guys do great work over there.) The problem is still disseminating information as quickly as possible and that’s not easy.

There are a lot of factors that change when it comes to keeping flight status information up to date. The weather changes, the airports update what runways are open and when, and then the airlines still get hit by surprise mechanicals or crew staffing issues. (If crews get stuck in the snow and can’t get the airport, you’ve got a problem.) So it’s going to be impossible to have perfect info, but I wish the airlines would be more willing to divulge the imperfect info they have. That opens up a ton of other problems (incorrect info makes people miss flights), but people would rather not be kept in the dark.

Other than that, I think the airlines and airports did a decent job of handling the storm of the decade considering everything working against them. That’s not conventional wisdom, for sure, but knowing the complexity of handling something like this, I’m not sure how it could have been handled better.

It was just last month that the Department of Transportation (DOT) said not to rush to judgment after seeing more cancellations and slightly fewer 3 hour delays in May. We needed more time, they said. Well apparently the DOT only thinks that’s the case if the numbers don’t help their cause. Now that June numbers are out, they’re jumping on them as proof of success. Slow down there, DOT. Your base level look at June numbers is way too superficial and smells simply of politics.

On the surface, things looked much better this year for long ground delays, and really, they were. There were three flights that sat on the runway for more than 3 hours during June 2010. In June 2009, that number was a whopping 278. This year, none sat for more than 4 hours. Last year, it was 42.

So did cancellations spike as a result? A little, but not much. Though the DOT would like you to think that both this year and last saw no change at 1.5 percent of flights canceled, that’s only thanks to rounding. In 2009, it was 1.48 percent. In 2010, it was 1.50 percent. So there was a very slight increase. In fact, three fewer flights were canceled this year but with 6,307 fewer flights operating.

Sounds like a tremendous success, right? Well, it’s good news for some, but it’s important to look at other factors year-over-year to see how we may have ended up in this place.

First, we have to remember that after last summer, the airlines did ramp up their efforts to reduce lengthy ground delays. So some of the reduction should be related to previous efforts and not simply the introduction of this rule. We’ll never know exactly what that is. But we can still dig in and see what happened last June. You’ll notice that the weather was significantly better, despite what many have said.

The Air Travel Consumer Report doesn’t give specifics on the flights that were delayed for three hours, but it does do it for the flights delayed more than 4 hours. So let’s focus on those. There were 42 of those, and most of them occurred during specific events. For example, 13 of them (11 at Dulles) happened in Washington on June 3, 2009. That’s the day that thunderstorms came and sat on top of Dulles from 8p to 10p.

So the weather was bad, but something had to be just as bad this year, right? Nope. In June, there were a couple days with quick passing storms, but the only day that saw sustained thunderstorms over a long period was June 28 when storms sat on Dulles from 145p to 3p, still a much shorter time period, especially when you’re looking at a 3 hour limit.

But the key is the time of day. I looked at flights scheduled on August 12, 2010 as a comparison. Not much should have changed between last year and this year. Between 145p and 3p, there are only 29 flights scheduled to arrive and 15 scheduled to depart. That’s an average of 23.2 arrivals per hour and 12 departures per hour during the time of the storm. Meanwhile, between 8p and 10p, 82 flights are scheduled to arrive and 32 scheduled to depart. Think about that, that’s 41 arrivals per hour or 16 departures. That’s a significant difference.

On top of that, the imbalance of arrivals to departures is huge at night. That’s because a lot of planes come in and stay the night before flying out in the morning. That means that the gates are full at night, so if planes don’t push back to depart on time, then arrivals have nowhere to go. That’s not usually the case during the day. And don’t underestimate the 2 hours of storms this year versus 1.25 hours last year. That’s a huge difference when 3 hours is your cutoff.

There were a couple other events we could look at in June 2009 as well, but I could paint a story for those too. I think the point is clear. Knowing that thunderstorms tend to be the biggest culprit for long ground delays during the summer, June was a luckier weather month in 2010 than it was in 2009.

That being said, even if we had the exact same weather this year, I would bet the performance would still have been better. Simply being more cognizant about the situation would have reduced the number of ground delays, but that’s going to have happened even if this rule didn’t exist.

The bottom line is that the DOT can’t have it both ways. If it wants to just use superficial results to advance its claim, go right ahead. But then don’t tell people who do more in-depth reviews that it’s too early to look at the results. This is a far more complicated issue than either the DOT or the pro-rule people want to admit.

Now that European airports are open and (as far as I know), no planes have fallen out of the sky, it’s time to look back on the aftermath of the Icelandic volcano. We worked on some pretty crazy itineraries at Cranky Concierge, so I thought I’d share some of them with you, because, well, it’s just fun to dork out on itineraries like these.

Perhaps the craziest one we found was one that wasn’t actually used. We had a client, let’s call him Doc, stranded in London when his flight canceled last Monday. Doc had to get to Toronto by Wednesday. So what happened? We came up with this:

*Eurostar from London to Paris Tuesday morning
*TGV from Paris to Irun (at the Spanish Frontier)
*Overnight train from Irun to Lisbon, arriving Wednesday morning
*SATA from Lisbon to Toronto via the Azores on Wednesday afternoon

Anyone ever flown SATA? I’d love to hear what that’s like, but Doc decided not to go and instead just wait it out in London. (He made it out last Friday.)

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The very first call we received about the volcano was at 230a PT on Friday, April 16. A new client, his name will be Thor, called from Halifax saying he was heading to New York and then was on Delta to London that afternoon. He fully expected the flight to be canceled, so he asked us to help. (It canceled soon after.) We were able to snag the very last seat on the New York – Keflavik (Iceland) flight that night on Icelandair connecting to Glasgow in the morning. At that point, Glasgow was still open.

Thor made it to Iceland, but the airspace closed in Glasgow before he was able to get there. Fortunately, Icelandair put him up for the first night and paid for his meals. That was far better than he would have received from Delta in New York. Icelandair started to send airplanes anywhere they could fly: they sent several flights to Trondheim, Norway. (And now that Keflavik is impacted by the volcano, they actually just started operating flights via Glasgow instead – amazing flexibility which you can read more about on BNET today.)

Thor didn’t want to mess around with visiting Norway and not having a way to get out of there, so he hung out in Iceland where the high speed internet gave him everything he needed. He spent three nights in Iceland before finally being booked on Tuesday to go to Heathrow. When Heathrow didn’t open, they sent him to Edinburgh and he hopped a train home.

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The toughest challenge we faced was a client, we’ll call her Oksana, heading to the first Theatre on Ice world championships being held in Toulouse. She wasn’t going to watch; she was there to compete. When her British Airways flight on Monday canceled, she had to find a way to get there.

After looking at several different options that involved everything from Dubai to Tripoli, we settled on the best option and it wasn’t going to be easy.

Oksana was in San Diego, but she ended up buying a ticket from LA to Tel Aviv on El Al on Wednesday connecting to another El Al flight to Madrid on Thursday. From there, she booked an overnight train from Madrid to Barcelona, arriving Friday morning. Then she would rent a car and drive the 3 hours or so to Toulouse, getting in just in time for her mandatory practice.

Unfortunately, British Airways wasn’t nearly as flexible as Icelandair and refused to simply cancel her outbound and let her keep the return. So we had to find Oksana another return. This one was easy – Swiss from Barcelona to Zurich and then on to LA. Then it would just be a short hop on American down to San Diego.

As you can imagine, this combined option wasn’t cheap (in fact, if you’d like to help defray the additional cost, they’re accepting donations via Paypal to helpctoi@gmail.com), but it got them there, and that was the name of the game throughout this entire couple of weeks.

Now that the backlog is clearing out and airlines are starting add flights, people are finally getting where they need to go. It’s incredible to think about how many special occasions were ruined because people couldn’t get there. These are just a couple stories out of a sea of hundreds of thousands, if not more. Just imagine how many didn’t turn out this well.

Poor European airline execs. They’ve suffered a great (revenue) loss and now they’re trying to cope with the pain. It looks like they’ve made it to the third stage out of five when it comes to coping with grief, but that means the toughest one (depression) lies ahead. Even though flights are finally getting back in the air, the loss will still weigh heavily for some time to come.

If you guys need help, reach out to your US-based counterparts. Those who were around during September 11 know the pain all too well. Let’s review how this works.

1. Denial
   When airlines first realized that the volcanic ash had a bullseye on Europe, they took it in stride. A few flights were canceled and it looked like any other large weather event. Sure it would have an impact, but it wouldn’t be that bad, right? They just figured it would go away and everything would be fine. If only that were true.
2. Anger
   As the shut down dragged on and on, airlines started to get angry at anyone they could. The wrath wasn’t directed at the volcano but rather at European aviation authorities. For example, a Lufthansa spokesperson said:

   The flight ban, made on the basis just of computer calculations, is resulting in billion-high losses for the economy.
   In future we demand that reliable measurements are presented before a flying ban is imposed.

   For many, this will be a welcome lambasting, but to me it seems somewhat irrational. We have plenty of examples of ash really messing things up in the past so why take chances? Even now, there are military aircraft with serious ash damage from flying around in this stuff. Sounds like some execs are just lashing out. It’s all part of the process.

3. Bargaining
   Now that the ash seems to be lifting and the airlines are seeing the financial damage rolling in, it’s time for the bargaining phase. British Airways is leading the charge with CEO Willie Walsh saying this:

   To assist us with this situation, European airlines have asked the EU and national governments for financial compensation for the closure of airspace.

   He then added, “If you can kick a little in for that strike a couple weeks ago, that’d be pretty sweet.”

4. Depression
   We haven’t moved beyond the bargaining phase yet, but I think we can assume this is what’s coming next. After the adrenalin stops pumping and the final loss numbers roll in, a general depression will hit the European industry execs. They’ll be hurting badly and many will think about just grounding the fleet and being done with it all. Stay strong; you’ll get through it.
5. Acceptance
   Finally, the execs will simply realize that this is the way it is. There’s no stopping Eyjafjallajökull and its ash-blowing, revenue-destroying power. The financial damage is done and the airlines will simply need to learn that there is no changing what happened. They need to realize that it’s not their fault that this happened. It’s just something that they need to accept and move on.

If you see an airline exec wandering aimlessly around the halls of the airport, give ‘em a pat on the back and remind that that it’s not their fault. They’ll get through this, with your help. (Oh, and with the help of large bonuses.)

It’s a rare week when there isn’t a strike at a European airline, but this appears to be one of them. Unhappy with this news, a big, mean volcano in Iceland called Eyjafjallajokull (strangely enough, pronounced simply as “Billy”) decided to start erupting. Thanks to the prevailing winds, many European airports are shut down until the ash cloud passes. Ugh.

Ash, in case you didn’t know, is like kryptonite for airplanes. No, it has nothing to do with reduced visibility as you might expect. That type of flying happens all the time. The problem is that the ash roughs up airplanes and has an unfortunate side effect of making engines stop running. So yes, it’s a good thing that air traffic has come to a halt. I’m just waiting to see how some lazy journalist finds a way to pin this on the airlines.

All London airports were shut down yesterday as were those up in Scandinavia. Airports on the continent starting shutting down a little later on as the ash cloud continued to move toward the southeast. The funny thing here is that Icelandic air traffic is largely unaffected because the winds are blowing the ash away.

So what exactly happens when an airplane flies into ash? It’s not good. There have been two very high profile incidents, both in the ’80s before they apparently realized that they should avoid flying into ash clouds at all costs.

The first was on British Airways in 1982. A 747 was on its way from Kuala Lumpur to Perth when it flew through a cloud of ash at 37,000 feet. The engines apparently weren’t so happy with that so they all shut down and the plane became a glider. Once they got below the ash, they were able to get the engines restarted, though not before they reached 13,000 feet. Yeah, it was a long and scary glide down. They landed safely in Jakarta.

The second was on KLM’s ever-popular (or not) Amsterdam to Anchorage route. They thought they were flying into a normal cloud at 25,000 feet, but, um, it was ash. The engines all quit and they started heading down. The first engines came back at 13,000 feet and they again landed safely. In both cases, there was some serious damage to the airplane.

Come to think of it, maybe this is the airlines’ fault. They wouldn’t have to cancel all these flights if they were just willing to fly at 13,000 feet all the way around, right? Or they could just climb to cruising altitude and sell it as a weightless adventure when they plunge 20,000 feet before getting the engines restarted. I think they might be missing out here.

Really, this is frustrating for everyone. The airlines are losing a ton of money while passengers get stuck. And the worst part? You can’t even see the ash cloud from the ground, so people are going to have a tougher time understanding why their flight is grounded. On top of that, they don’t know when the thing is going to move on. Sheesh.

If you’re flying to or from Europe this weekend, bring a lot of patience. It’s going to be a tough one.

[Original Photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kimon/ / CC BY-SA 2.0 and http://www.flickr.com/photos/cdelriccio/ / CC BY-SA 2.0]