Originally Posted by
davidjohnson6
Hi all
Could I gently nudge this thread back towards my original question, namely how pax can get better info when something goes wrong besides the cliché of "operational reasons" ?
Many of you have your own war stories, but some people have less time than others to read everything, and maybe best if everyone tries to stick to the subject of the thread ? On a radio, everyone likes a strong signal:noise ratio.
It's certainly possible to have a general war-story discussion... but maybe best to have its own separate thread
I have explained in a previous post why I gave up very early on trying to explain the 'real' reasons for delays to pax. It simply takes you into an endless series of questions, which invariably leads to a dispute and this is why so little information is disseminated to pax. Many of them suddenly turn into operations gurus who 'know' far more than you about how airline operations work. Anyone who has ever worked in ops/dispatch will testify to this. As I posted earlier, there can be 100 reasons for a flight delay. The one the dispatcher doesn't want to see is number 31, because this invariably leads - at best - to a meeting without coffee with the ops manager. Dispatchers are busy people and there is rarely time to interact with passengers. There's always another flight waiting to be dispatched. Try working in an ops room when there are several delayed flights due to ATC, weather, etc., or worse still, diversions. Dealing with the phones, the radio and monitoring the screens for activity, is like, as one of my former colleagues put it, 'Being a one-armed paperhanger.'
With regard to FR 24 as a source of reliable information, my experience is less than stellar. In one airport where I worked, we had FR 24 on a large screen in the ops room, basically in order to know in what sequence the flights were arriving. On several occasions, the registrations of the aircraft turned out to be different from those on the screen. Invariably, the departure signal had posted the correct registration and flight number, but it did lead to confusion, not something you need when the LCCs have minimum turnaround times. The reasons for this were never determined
afaik, despite discussions with the flight deck and airline ops. When I occasionally dip into FR 24 nowadays, I still see errors in the information provided, so, on a personal level at least, I am not convinced that it is a totally reliable source of information.