Tower-operations employees decide whether to hold a flight that is waiting for a connecting passenger.
“If you start taking delays early in the morning, it’s a domino effect,” said tower-operations manager William Kikuchi. “You take a delay in the first departure of the day, the originating flight, then all day you’re set up for failure because you’re always trying to make up the time, and it’s really tough to make up the time. We run a tight schedule.”
At system-operations control at Frontier headquarters, director George Webster has a secret weapon: a spare airplane, which helps prevent delays and cancellations when there’s a maintenance problem. Denver is Frontier’s only hub, so major maintenance must be done in Denver.
Planes may be delayed because runways are closed or because of federal limits on the hours a flight crew may work consecutively.
In bad weather, Frontier may need to delay a series of flights to maintain “bank integrity” – that is, to make sure there is enough time to accommodate passengers connecting to other flights throughout the system.
A key factor in helping prevent delays is getting Frontier pilots and aircraft Category III certified, allowing them to fly in poor weather conditions as low as 300 feet. What that enables is more on-time flights.
The battle against time never ends.
“There’s a lot of holes in the bucket of on-time performance,” said Mike O’Leary, the ramp duty manager. “We’re plugging the leaks all the time. Some of them we can’t control.”
