Winging It: Airlines' new approach on cancellations shown

The winter storms of the last 10 days make this one of those times when I have great sympathy - both for stranded travelers, and for airlines and airports.

Like cities and states across the country, airlines can blow their budgets, not for snow-plowing but for canceling flights, rebooking customers, and rerouting aircraft. And consider how many miles of pavement had to be cleared at Philadelphia International and other airports.

But beyond the immediate effects, the way airlines have dealt with the storms, canceling thousands of flights in advance, may provide a glimpse at how they deal with similar disruptions in the future.

The industry is facing tough new federal rules, scheduled to take effect April 20, guaranteeing passengers adequate water, food, and sanitation if they're stranded for hours on airport tarmacs, and assessing heavy fines for violations.

Already, some aviation experts say airlines have become much more "risk-averse" than they traditionally were when nasty weather was forecast.

Whatever the reasons behind the cancellations, the numbers of flights wiped out and the air-travelers affected are staggering because they cover back-to-back storms.

The Air Transport Association, which represents airlines that carry 90 percent of U.S. passengers, said its members canceled about 13,000 flights that would have been used by almost a million customers between Feb. 5 and Wednesday.

"I can't think of storms of this breadth in over a decade," said association spokesman David Castelveter. "It was a one-two punch."

Other estimates ranged as high as 20,000 flights canceled, including those scratched on Thursday. The numbers will likely grow even more this weekend as a result of yet another storm affecting parts of the Southwest and Southeast.

At Philadelphia, officials said about 500 scheduled departures were canceled during the Feb. 5 to Feb. 7 storm, and an estimated 1,000 were wiped out from Tuesday through Thursday. The airport averages about 600 departures a day.

Flightstats.com, which automatically tracks scheduled flights at all airports, had a more precise figure for Philadelphia: 1,573 departures canceled because of the storms.

Robert Mann, a former airline executive who is now an aviation consultant in Port Washington, N.Y., recalled how a couple of decades ago, the industry didn't plan as well when winter storms were approaching as they do now.

After experiencing some massive disruptions at their hub airports, carriers saw they needed a more systematic approach to positioning aircraft and flight crews away from airports likely to be closed, and then moving them back where they were needed as the airports reopened, Mann said.

"Instead of doing it on the fly, they decided to put some science behind it," he said.

The industry also developed what Mann described as automated "support tools" and procedures for airport customer-service and reservations agents that help determine which customers are rebooked first after their flights have been canceled.

An airline may use a customer's flight history, frequent-flier status, or the cost of their ticket in deciding who gets to go out on the first-available nonstop, who has to connect through a hub, and who can't get another flight for days.

An employee of a company that spends millions of dollars a year with an airline and uses a travel agency to make its arrangements may also have an advantage.

I asked several airlines last week to describe their recovery process to me. Here's what one carrier, Continental, said in an e-mail:

"During flight irregularities, the majority of our customer rebookings are automated. Continental's automated system is programmed to rebook customers considering various factors such as unaccompanied minors, customers with disabilities, first-class and elite frequent fliers, and routing. Airport agents and reservations agents also have the ability to rebook customers during irregular operations."

Even those using free frequent-flier tickets, if they've achieved an elite-level status based on millions of miles flown, may be closer to the head of the line than a business traveler with an expensive last-minute ticket, Mann said.

What's new this winter is the fallout from the airlines' habit of occasionally leaving planes sitting on airport tarmacs for hours, despite promising over the last decade that they would not torture customers that way.

Last summer's stranding of a Continental Express flight for six hours at Rochester, Minn., brought renewed pressure in Congress and on federal regulators to get tougher.

In December, the U.S. Department of Transportation issued the new rules scheduled to take effect in April. They call for fines of $27,500 per passenger if a flight is stuck away from an airport terminal without adequate provisions for more than three hours.

The passenger-rights regulations "have driven the airlines to be much more risk-averse," Mann said. They will now cancel large numbers of flights in advance if there's a chance operations will be disrupted by the weather.