As severe winter weather swept across the Midwest and Northeast over the Christmas holidays, the inevitable travel delays started to pile up. Flights were significantly delayed and canceled, with passengers left stranded as airlines scrambled to adjust their packed schedules.
One passenger on a delayed United Airlines plane at Chicago O’Hare, however, praised the actions of a Captain who further delayed a flight despite attempts by ground staff to get the passengers on their way as fast as possible.
Becky Schmooke was traveling with her family on what should have been a short 40-minute flight to their home in Iowa, but after facing an afternoon and evening of mounting delays, they finally boarded their United Boeing 737 close to midnight.
Everyone was finally on board the plane, and the cabin doors were set to be closed when Becky overheard a conversation taking place between the Captain and the gate agents.
The flight attendants had ‘timed out’ – they had reached the upper limit of their federally mandated duty limits and weren’t able to carry on.
“Duty limits are firm. When time is up, it’s up,” Becky explained in a now viral post on Facebook. “But being done by regulation does not mean you can simply walk away once a plane is boarded and full of people.”
The ground staff wanted the flight attendants to remain on board while they worked to find a replacement set of crew members to take over the plane. The Captain disagreed. He could see that the flight attendants were exhausted and needed to end their working day, right there and then.
That would, however, mean deplaning all of the passengers back into the terminal, further delaying the flight.
“The captain, facing the jet bridge, explained to someone outside of my line of sight that the passengers would need to deplane and wait for a new crew,” Becky explained. “There was pushback.”
“He explained it again, calmly. When that didn’t change anything, his tone shifted. Clear. Final.”
“He made it unmistakably clear that his flight attendants were done for the night and he was not going to keep the crew stuck on the plane while logistics were debated.”
Overhearing this conversation, you might think that Becky’s reaction would be one of frustration. Not in the slightest.
“Leadership is often talked about in terms of efficiency and outcomes. But leadership shows itself just as clearly in what someone refuses to optimize away,” Becky said of the Captain’s response to the situation.
“Sometimes the job is to stand in the way. Some decisions are inconvenient. Some are costly.”
Becky added: “As I stepped off the plane to wait for the new crew for our flight home, I made sure to thank the captain for standing up for his crew.”
Under regulations set by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), airlines are generally allowed to schedule flight attendants to work a maximum duty day of up to 14 hours on domestic duties with minimum crewing levels.
It’s important to note that this is only a ‘scheduling’ limit. This is the maximum that airlines plan their schedules on, but when things go wrong on the day, flight attendants don’t necessarily have to walk off the job as soon as the 14-hour timer is reached.
Technically, that means that the ground staff were allowed to ask if the flight attendants were willing to stay beyond their maximum duty day, but sometimes, crews have to ask themselves whether they are so tired that it would be unsafe to continue working.
This certainly sounds like what happened in this case. The Captain could tell that the crew was exhausted, and if an emergency did occur, they might not be able to respond in the way expected of them.
Matt’s take
Flight attendants can feel under a lot of pressure to keep on going, even if they know they have been pushed beyond their limits. It’s good to see that, rather than thinking of themselves, the pilots in this case realized it was better not only to delay the passengers but also their own arrival in Iowa by deplaning everyone while a replacement crew was found.
