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Opinion: Airline overreaction a smart move

By Brett Snyder, Special to CNN
Passengers check in at New York's LaGuardia airport Monday after it resumed operations.
Passengers check in at New York's LaGuardia airport Monday after it resumed operations.
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
  • Brett Snyder: Canceling thousands of flights, closing airports was overly cautious
  • But airlines smart to keep crews, equipment out of harm's way to avoid more chaos, he says
  • Snyder says tarmac delay rule played some role in the number of flights canceled

Editor's note: Brett Snyder writes a weekly CNN.com travel column. Snyder is the founder of air travel assistance site Cranky Concierge, and he writes the consumer air travel blog The Cranky Flier.

(CNN) -- Hurricane Irene is making its way out to sea after blowing across the East Coast, and as is often the case, the airline and airport reaction to her approach was far greater than necessary.

Airlines started canceling flights in the Northeast as the weekend approached, and the big New York City airports actually shut down until Monday, as did Philadelphia's airport. If you were scheduled to fly in, out or through those airports, you know that finding new flights was a real challenge since airlines canceled early and often.

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So why did the airlines cancel so many flights when many more could have gone with ease? It's a combination of logistics, Boy Scout-like overpreparedness, and probably a little dash of fear of government-imposed penalties.

It seems simple in theory. The airlines should just keep flying until the weather gets too bad, and then stop, right? If only it were that easy. There were a few things working against them.

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First were the preparations in the surrounding areas. Mandatory evacuations and the shutdown of public transit in some metro areas meant that actually getting workers to the airport would have been nearly impossible. Remember, once that last flight leaves, there's still a lot of support staff required, and many of them rely on public transit.

Beyond that, the airlines wanted to make sure they cleared all their airplanes out of the area. So if a flight was scheduled to arrive in New York at 1 p.m. Saturday, it easily could have operated. But then, the airplane would have had to fly out of New York as well, to avoid potential damage from high winds and flooding.

It's better to cancel flights over the weekend than to have airplanes out of service for weeks. Just ask Frontier, which saw several airplanes damaged by hail during a summer thunderstorm in Denver. It took a long time to get all those airplanes flying again. Nobody wants to take that chance when there's a big storm approaching. Even a big jet can get spun around on the ground in a stiff wind, and who knows what it might hit.

On top of that, there are crew logistics. Getting the right people to the airport to fly each flight can be tough when other flights have started canceling. Airlines instead opted to take the smart route: Set a cutoff time for operations ending, and then reboot everything after the storm is gone.

Looking back, was it all necessary? No. It looks like the storm moved through more quickly than expected and damage was less than the worst predictions. Flooding seems to be minimal, compared with some of the worst-case fears. But the airlines couldn't take that chance.

Raise your hand if you remember JetBlue's Valentine's Day meltdown a few years back. That happened because the airline tried to fly through a nasty winter storm. It was a winter storm, so it's a bit different, but the result is the same in the end. If you try to fly a full schedule, then it takes far longer to recover because your planes and crews are in the wrong place. It's no surprise that JetBlue was the first to start canceling flights en masse this time around.

But could a reduced schedule, instead of no schedule, have been flown? Probably. There's little doubt that more flights were canceled than needed to be. You can never predict everything right on, but I'd bet the government played a role in this as well.

Ever since the three-hour tarmac delay rule went into effect last year, the airlines have been far quicker to cancel flights in order to avoid the potentially hefty fees. Even before the airports started stopping operations, the airlines were already more aggressively canceling flights to avoid big fines.

In the end, there's no doubt that a lot of travelers were inconvenienced, and probably more than ultimately needed to be. But the airlines have to consider so many factors in running an operation that it's never going to be perfect.

The key is seeing how quickly the airlines can get up and running again. So far, things seem to be moving along.

What do you think? Has your travel been affected by the storm? What was your experience?