Raleigh Airport Melts Down, And How Checked Bags Are Stored On A Plane [Roundup]

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About Gary Leff

Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel - a topic he has covered since 2002. Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »

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Comments

  1. Phoenix Sky Harbor had a power outage on Monday. I wonder what the odds are of that happening twice in one week.

  2. Looking forward to my first flight in 2 years Thanksgiving week. Hope it’s not worse than the alternative which would have been a 20 hour drive.

  3. At least it’s Concourse B, but that Sweetwater restaurant at DEN is almost all the way down at one end (gate B80). If you have a departure at B10-20s, prepare for a haul.

  4. How can the guy who runs American get any kind of award? Every time I turn around, American has made another blunder. But I guess the ‘old boy network’ is alive and well with our legacy airlines.

  5. Gary: I happened to fly from RDU this morning. TSA was doing the best to manually process the passengers but it took me 2.5 hours (!) to clear TSA-Pre. My bag was searched the last as the power to TSA was restored at about 8 am. The other part of the problem that AA had only 3 gates operational because the rest of the Terminal 2 was still without power till about 11:30 am. But even with gates operational AA was unable to depart any flights before 10 am (i.e., after 2 hrs since power was restored). When the power was fully restored, AA was unable to get the act together for another 2-3 hours. The problem was that the crews had their own interests and were actively changing their assignments. So AA has B737 had a plane parked at the gate with a pilot in at about 11:30 am but the plane did not depart for another 2 hours because they did not have plight attendants. None of the AA staff including legacy AAngels at the club had any clues what is going on and they did not have any information. The overall picture was not very pretty. This is how AA is run nowadays – it is an operational disaster.

  6. @Alex_77W

    Not fair to judge AA operations on an airport power outage. Surely other airlines faced similar challenges today.

  7. Wait until all those electric cars are hooked up to the grid. Nothing but power outages in the future

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