Making it through the rain: a few airline travel tips for bad weather

It was past midnight and I was just about to log off my computer, when I got a semi-hysterical email from a client scheduled to leave on a cross-country flight at noon.

She had just watched the late night news with a forecast for heavy rain, especially in the late morning and early afternoon, and wanted to change her flight. She figured a late afternoon flight would have a better chance of being on-time.

But in reality, she was looking at a far greater chance for delay, and here’s why:

Most bad weather at airports affects landings more than takeoffs. Which means your best chance for an on-time flight is with a plane that is already parked at the airport the night before.

A plane leaving at 4 p.m., as she requested, will almost certainly be on at least its second flight of the day. And once a plane gets behind, it’s very difficult to make up time.

A few more tips: When landings are restricted at an airport, long-haul flights generally get priority. Which meant that yesterday in San Francisco, most cross-country flights had at worst minor delays. Flights within California, however, were often a complete mess, many of them delayed over an hour or flat out canceled.

Which means, if you can’t get a nonstop flight at a time you think there is a chance of bad weather, a cross country flight connecting in the middle of the country generally has better odds than a flight that begins or ends with a short commuter connection.

The two exceptions to that rule are when you can get so close to your final destination that driving or a train becomes an emergency backup – for example, New York to Philadelphia, or D.C. to Charlottesville. Or when the choice is between say, rain in Los Angeles and snow in Chicago.

Also, if it’s a really bad storm, and this generally means monsoons, hurricanes, and blizzards, not steady rain, windy days and snow flurries, check with your carrier to see if there is a travel waiver. In that case, you can usually rebook without penalties.

Another day of travel option, if everything is backed up an hour or two, check the departure monitor upon arrival for delayed flights to your destination. If a plane that was supposed to leave an hour ago is still at the airport, you might be able to catch an earlier flight out on a standby basis.

Finally potentially the most important tip – allow extra time to get to the airport. Most major airports and commercial airlines have all kinds of specialized equipment to help out in storms. But driving is likely to be difficult, both because of road conditions, and quite frankly, many drivers’ inability to cope well with unfamiliar weather.

As it turns out in my client’s case, while she may have been skeptical of my reasoning, she nonetheless decided not to pay the $500 change fee. And despite some serious rain, all the flights from San Francisco to Washington that day were within about half an hour of being on-time. As it turned out, the worst delay – an hour – was due to a non-weather related luggage issue.

(Photo: ChimanZ APe/flickr/creative commons)

Tagged as: airline delays, rain delays, travel tips for bad weather