And it's very well to say that it's easy to divert passengers down south, but what about the 27 poor sods that were travelling AUH-MAN-ORD, who are now faced with yet another stop en-route. Thank god it wasn't yesterday, there were 59 connecting on the same route!
How about rather than divert passengers, and not cancel the flight at all. It seems for the past 2 years at least, AA are finding it far too easy to cancel the Manchester flight. It must be one of the poorest OTP TATL routes AA has now.