We had an unusual experience on Delta yesterday that may be something to do with hurricane Debbie a few days earlier. But may not.
We were taking a last family vacation before both kids disappear to college and were booked on Delta LGA to YYZ with a senior offspring meeting us there, flying in from Chicago.
With a departure time of 2:30, at about 1:40 we first learned that Delta didn't appear to have a captain. The captain seemed to be somewhere else. Delay follow delay until about 5:00 when he finally arrived. It seemed to take an inordinate amount of time to load everyone onto the plane and then we waited for further 15-20 minutes before the captain suddenly apologizes over the intercom that the taxiways were moving very slowly, and that whereas we could go and start queuing now, there was a two-hour wait to get to the front of the queue and take off. He said in his announcement that the problem was that although he has been brought to the flight in good time to get us to Toronto, he had been up since 5:30 that morning and if he were to wait those 2 hours before takeoff, he would be out of time to complete the flight to its destination.
The Captain seemed to be explaining clearly that this is a rostering issue not a weather issue. He had been up since 5.30 that morning and couldn't wait for two hours on the taxiway . He said that the chances of Delta finding another captain to take the flight were slim and he then deplaned all the PAX and told us all that they GA was to rebook us on later flights.
Of course, there weren't any that had any significant numbers of seats on them, so although the GA basically was very nice and hard-working about his task, basically Delta's attitude was that we should get lost because it wasn't going to fly us anywhere.
No one explained why LGA was having so much trouble getting flights waiting on taxiways to take off?
To me this sounds like a rostering issue. The captain couldn't fly the plane and Delta didn't have enough pilots around who could take over.
By this time our son was already in the air on his flight from Chicago and Delta were telling us that there was no way they could get us to Chicago until 2 Days later.
Our trip was ruined. I want money wasted for the hotel suite in Chicago and one person was arriving for the family gathering to be alone in Toronto for 4 days.
In desperation we even offered to try to change destinations and try to get everyone to somewhere where Delta could fly us. That GA didn't seem interested in that proposal and just said that if we wanted to change out flight(s), we would have to pay the difference in fares between the price we paid for our tickets and the presumably maximum price Delta could charge for last minute changes to get somewhere else.
All this got me wondering why there is no liability on an airline to perform under the contract if they haven't got enough pilots on their roster to get us to our destination. The GA was looking very busy and exasperated etc but didn't seem to be helping any passengers to get on to flights and he seemed to be using the weather (which hadnt been particularly bad all day) as an excuse for the airline not to help any passenger. While we were waiting at the gate between 2.00 and 5.00 we heard continuous announcements for the flight before ours, for our flight, and for I think pretty much every other flight in the area for people who have to fly on that flight to see whether any of them would take anything up to $1300 in some sort of credit to take a later flight. By this I understand that load control had done a particularly good job of filling all flights to capacity and in fact there was no way of booking a whole plane full of people in the same position as we were to their destination.
Does anybody see this as a rostering issue for which the airline should be liable and is there a possibility that the GA didn't know that the reason why the flight didn't take off was because LGA was taking too long (while it wasn't even raining!) to get their flights to the front of the taxiway?
Am I being unreasonable and expecting to be compensated in some way for this situation which seems to have been caused by their not having enough qualified pilots at the right place at the right time to fly this flight?
