Is there a way to determine if an airline flight actually happened?
Asked by
shilolo (
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December 22nd, 2009
My mom got caught in the big East Coast snowstorm. She was supposed to fly out west on Sunday, but was told over the phone on Saturday that her flight was cancelled (for Sunday), even though the online status did not show cancelled. The agent cancelled her Sunday ticket and put her on a Monday flight. So, my dad suspects “foul play” in that the airline bumped her back a day to accommodate the stranded flyers from Friday/Saturday. Is that possible or is he being paranoid? Can you tell if a specific flight on a specific day actually went off (I’m sure there’s a log, but don’t know if it’s publicly available)? Thanks.
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13 Answers
www.flightstats.com will give answers to all your current flight questions AND also airport status.
The FAA keeps a log,but I don’t know if civilians have access to it. Also, sometimes the military substitutes surveillance flights for civil airline scheduled flights, right down to transponder codes.
Does it matter? I don’t think there’s anything you can do about it either way.
Why can’t you do something about the airline deliberately lying to you in order to bump you from your seat, which you purchased months beforehand? I understand they are trying to alleviate the burden of those stranded longer, but that shouldn’t necessarily involve bumping people through misinformation. I actually just checked flightstats.com, and indeed the flight did leave on Sunday.
Also, it does matter in that, with multiple carriers, you have the option of not flying with them again if their behavior is so nefarious. The airline was the craptastic US Airways, which I would never fly anyway except its hub is in Philly. I almost exclusively fly Southwest BECAUSE OF their outstanding customer service. I abhor US Airways, and this is yet another nail in their coffin as far as I’m concerned.
@Snarp Does it matter? I don’t think there’s anything you can do about it either way
If I were bumped off a flight, I would ask for compensation. Typically they ask for volunteers in exchange for a free future flight.
If a flight is cancelled for reasons beyond the airlines control (weather), they typically do not compensate passengers.
I just looked at some random flight on Flightaware.com and could see 3 day old results.
@shilolo Ugh, I hate US Airways, I’d be furious. What if she was coming for a special occasion or something else time sensitive? I’m from Philly and try to avoid them at all cost. But then I had a bad experience with Frontier, which is what we usually use…it’s hard not to hold something against an airline.
I just discussed this at length with a commercial airline pilot (working for a major carrier that is NOT US Airways). Here was his opinion:
In the event of backup from snowstorms the operations center of the airline will usually add aircraft and flights out to accommodate the backup. It is against policy to remove ticket holders from a flight to make room for others who have been waiting and this would not only be unethical but may even be ileagal. An airline could be fined for doing so and the publicity fallout would be huge.
That being said- if the computer says the flight was not cancelled it wasn’t.
He concluded by saying that perhaps the agent made an error when calling your Mom OR perhaps they cancelled the flight then reinstated it. In any scenario it is worth pursuing with the airline to find out exactly what happened.
Please keep us updated on what happens and what the response from US Airways is.
I’ve never gotten any kind of satisfaction out of an airline. Forunately, when US Airways left me stranded in Philadelphia I had travel insurance that covered my cab fare, train fare, and hotel bill. I hope you have better luck with the airline than I did. But it may not be worth the time it takes to get results.
Some airlines will lie just because they can’t think of anything else to do.
I was once on a flight from L.A. to Dulles, with a scheduled stop in Chicago. When we got to Chicago, they told us that we would need to deplane who invented that word?? for an hour so they could clean up. I thought that was odd, but whatever. We grabbed our things and piled out.
After the last passenger was in the terminal, the sign above the gate suddenly changed: it had said “Wash. D.C.”, but now it suddenly said “Honolulu”! I was flabbergasted—they had kicked us off the flight in mid-journey and reassigned our aircraft to some other purpose! We were stranded in Chicago!
They made us all get in the “reaccomodation desk” line, which was a 3-hour queue designed to frustrate everyone and put them on planes that sort of went in the direction of Washington D.C.. I finally ended up in Baltimore long after midnight, where the promised shuttle bus to Dulles never showed up.
That was AirTran—later I learned they were the former notorious ValuJet. I learned with great pleasure of their recent bankruptcy a couple years back.
@Dog Thanks for the useful information. When she called the airline the day before to find out if it was cancelled, it said that it wasn’t online. The agent told her that he had more detailed information, and that indeed it was cancelled. However, I looked it up on the Flightstats.com website and found that it actually flew (albeit one hour late). How do you cancel then uncancel a flight? I think that’s a whole lot of bullshit.
@shilolo wrote: ” How do you cancel then uncancel a flight? I think that’s a whole lot of bullshit.”
Funny, the pilot said the same thing after he mentioned it was a possibility.
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