How major airlines recovered after the last southern winter storm | Cruising Altitude

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A winter storm swept across the Southeast a couples of weeks ago, bringing snow and frigid temperatures to parts of the country that aren’t always the best equipped to deal with such conditions.  

The storm also caused chaos at some major airports, with Dallas/Fort Worth, Charlotte, North Carolina, and Atlanta squarely in the path of the worst of the weather. Those three airports are major hubs for American Airlines (DFW and Charlotte) and Delta Air Lines (Atlanta) and together accounted for a majority of the flight cancellations across the country during the height of the storm. 

◾ When the weather first started affecting airports on Jan. 9, there were 2,144 cancellations among U.S. airlines, according to FlightAware data. American accounted for 790 of those, mostly concentrated on its hub at Dallas/Fort Worth. Its regional partners also had hundreds of canceled flights. As the storm moved east, American saw its Charlotte hub impacted, as did Delta in Atlanta.  

◾ There were 3,532 cancellations among U.S airlines on Jan. 10, with 754 on American and 935 on Delta. Atlanta accounted for the majority of Delta’s cancellations and both Charlotte and DFW were impacted for American. Both airlines’ regional partners canceled hundreds of flights on Jan. 10 as well.  

◾ On Jan. 11, there were 902 cancellations among U.S. airlines. By then, American was well on the way to recovery, but Delta still had 383 canceled flights, not including its regional partners.  

◾ By Jan. 12, things were more or less back to normal, with 146 cancellations among U.S. airlines – just three on American and 32 on Delta.

That kind of recovery is hardly guaranteed. I’ve spent plenty of days in my career as an aviation reporter writing about airlines struggling to recover from bad weather. But every so often it’s nice to look into what it takes for things to go as planned. 

What went right this time? I spoke to executives at both airlines to find out. 

Preparation 

At both American and Delta, planning started long before the storm actually hit. 

“We were starting to look at this while the system was kind of still developing, out over the Pacific,” Suzanne Williamson, managing director of American’s Integrated Operations Center told me. 

“If there’s a good thing about this storm, it was fairly predictable,” John Laughter, Delta's chief of operations, said. “We had pretty good early forecasts.” 

Still, both teams knew their major hubs were going to be hit with weather that was unusual for the region, and they had to start planning for that in advance. 

“First of all, you let your customers know they can change their tickets if they need to, with no fee,” Laughter said. “We had a lot of people who went ahead and moved their travel up or back and that lightens the load on day one of the event.” 

Both airlines began issuing waivers to help passengers plan around the weather, while simultaneously preparing things internally. 

“First, we just prepared the ground teams for the temperature drops,” Williamson said. “We had to work on three different plans: the team that worked here in the IOC, roads were going to be a really big factor, so we wanted to make sure we had options for them to stay overnight. We made sure that we had a plan to take care of the people here in the building as well as at DFW and Charlotte Airport that were going to be busy helping our customers.” 

Both carriers said they also worked with the airport operators to make sure concessionaires were prepared for passengers whose schedules had been thrown off. And, crucially, the airlines also moved some planes to other airports, so they’d be positioned to help the operation recover once the storm passed. 

“We moved some number of airplanes out of Atlanta to get them to stations where they wouldn’t be covered in snow and ice,” Laughter said. “Those come in as clean airplanes, ready to participate in running the operation that day or recovering the following day.” 

During the storm 

No amount of planning ever truly prepares airlines for a storm, so a big part of the job is adjusting in real time to conditions as they come. 

“You do pretty well in snow, but moderate freezing rain is a showstopper,” Laughter said. “We had multiple periods where the airport temporarily closed.” 

While the weather was happening, both airlines were focused on minimizing disruptions to the flights they hadn’t already canceled, working with airports to keep runways and taxiways clear, and doing what they could to optimize their de-icing operations. 

“It’s about keeping the airport, the environment clean and ready, snow removed, and then it’s about having our pilots, our flight attendants and our airplanes all lined up so we can get our customers onboard and move them to where they want to be,” Laughter said. 

Both executives also noted that rest periods mandated by the Federal Aviation Administration for flight crews can complicate scheduling during a storm because flight delays affect the rest clock and can throw a wrench in crew schedule planning.

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Recovery 

It’s after the storm that airlines and their passengers really find out if the preparations paid off. 

“The focus is really to recover as quickly as we can and do right by the customer,” Williamson said. “Two days later it’s really hard to explain that weather is what caused your flight to be delayed or canceled.” 

For both airlines, things more or less went as planned this time. Still, both companies said every storm is a learning opportunity to help them fine-tune their response to the next one. 

“We definitely felt like it went as well as it could under incredibly challenging conditions, but some of the things are just adjustments that we make to the algorithm that looks at how long it takes to spray airplanes with de-icing fluid,” Williamson said. “Minor tweaks like that would help us factor in what the total taxi time will be and we might have had some different approaches to individual flights.” 

(This story was updated to change or add a photo or video.)

Zach Wichter is a travel reporter and writes the Cruising Altitude column for Paste BN. He is based in New York and you can reach him at zwichter@usatoday.com.