Northwest blames pilot no-shows for cancellations

undsioux1 said:
i just got back from MEM trying to Nonrev up to MSP. Flight I was on last night had 20 open seats still and today was oversold by 35. Girlfriend wasnt too happy when i told her i wasnt coming. I wonder if cancellations led up to that, or is that normal?
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Oh heck, that happens at lots of places.

On the flight home from JFK, they were offering $400 because they were oversold, but in the last few minutes Kristie and I were able to get on the jet... and there were other open seats too!
 
USA Today had an article about this today. Said NWA has stated that they are going to trim down the August domestic schedule by 4%, and hire more pilots. . .after ALPA's suggestion that it is a staffing issue due to the companies lack of having a proper staff.
 
Doug Taylor said:
Oh heck, that happens at lots of places.

On the flight home from JFK, they were offering $400 because they were oversold, but in the last few minutes Kristie and I were able to get on the jet... and there were other open seats too!
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Had something similar happen. My wife and I were revenue tickets, flight oversold.....I sold mine back, she went on, I went and jumped out on another carrier.
 
Doug Taylor said:
Oh heck, that happens at lots of places.

On the flight home from JFK, they were offering $400 because they were oversold, but in the last few minutes Kristie and I were able to get on the jet... and there were other open seats too!
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Wow. Guess Im still new to this.
 
Don't try to figure it out. It's the airline business.

Logic and reason? BAH!
 
Sometimes the airline gets more volunteers than needed or they deny boarding to a larger party, such as a family of four. That would cause an oversold aircraft to go out with open seats.
 
Or the gate agent simply screwed up and panicked. I've seen that happen. "Oh lawd! I'm oversold by 6!" She got like 10 volunteers and took 'em all. What they're SUPPOSED to do is wait and see if there are any no-shows or misconnects, then they only take the first X amount that volunteered. For example, let's say you have 4 volunteers on a CRJ, that's booked to 55. Because of 1 no-show, you're now down to 54. Now you have a couple of late flights triggering 4 misconnects. Bingo. You're down to 50 and don't have to take any volunteers. You thank the people, but then you inform them that you won't need to remove them from the flight. They go on their way, but they don't get the travel voucher or the night at the hotel since you didn't have to deny them boarding. What normally happens is gate agents freak out and don't want to get screamed at or delay the flight. So, they generally take more volunteers than they need IF they get them.

What the USA Today article failed to mention is that ALPA mentioned the staffing problem to NWA management months ago.....
 
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