There’s no inaccurate comments. It’s been known that Worcester has a history of delays and American never even took off from worcester a couple days ago and JetBlue left a couple hours late. This week will be a very telling week for operations at ORH.
It made national headlines when the plane from JFK had people sitting there for an hour because no one was there to bring the gate to it. They’ll have to be good or else there will be real problems and people’s reputation of the airport are not going to be good.
Five out of the next 8 days the FLL is sold out and the other ones are at 90% capacity. From the 22nd to the 27th as well as the 29th, 30th, and May 1st, the return flight to ORH is sold out. April 15th, 16th, and 19th to 23rd both JetBlue flights to JFK are sold out (the 17th mid day turn is sold out).
The delta flight to LaGuardia is at really good numbers for the next two weeks as well. Would not surprise me to see the A220, A320, or A321 make an appearance at least once these next 2 weeks at Worcester because of how packed the flights will be. It happened in March during spring break where the A321 with mint, made an appearance because of how packed it was (that’s a 159 seat aircraft).
Hopefully Rectrix (which I believe is the one who is in charge of operations for those flights) gets it together finally because if they can do good the next 2 weeks, then Worcester’s positive reputation can go a long way with getting more flights to the airport,
Comments
The leaving the plane at the gate is a different story & from my buddies who still work there that issue was handled at the highest lvl to ensure it nvr happens again.
Also Rectrix doesn’t service Delta so anything service related has zero to do with them. Rectrix also historically never serviced American when they flew the E145’s to Philly. They do service the E175’s to JFK as of rn however the contract is ending & American chose to use their own staff once again. Think they were unhappy with how much the Rectrix was costing them vs using their own people. That switch will happen soon.
2. Thank you Rusty for your honest and accurate comments.
3. Shame on this blog's Administrator for creating a post from an outlandish comment.
I challenge you to create a post fom this comment.
The comments this "anonymous" person is making are truly innacurate as he/she is making conclusions from his/her assumptions. Yes, delays and cancellations occur out of Worcester. But this person automatically assumes is a Worcester problem. Classic "Ready, Fire, Aim". When flights are delayed out of Worcester, the reasons are no different from other airports. Mechanicals, weather, deicing, crew legality, ATC ground stop and delays, etc. Cancellations? Jetblue had 150 yesterday. Over 50 in Boston alone. Republic (AA)? 53. 2 in Boston 2 in PVD. Overall, Worcester probably has a better on time performance than surrounding airports. Has anyone ever heard the pilot announce "we're number 12 for take off, or we're number 7 for deicing, or my favorite... "folks we got you here in time, but we dont have a gate for you". 4 jetbridges, 3 airlines, and 5 flights per day..... you'll never have a delay...... oh wait..... one.... yes, the one that made national news.... I'm guessing between jetblue, American, and Delta there have been over 10,000 arrivals into Worcester since they started serving the airport and how many times did they have a delay with the jetbridge? Yea, once. So, get over it.
Jetblue just has not been having the best month either. They even had a weird schedule yesterday where the mid day flight to ORH arrived on time, and they cancelled the return trip, cancelled the evening flight to ORH, and used that aircraft this morning for the FLL flight down there. The aircraft that came from FLL last night left ORH an hour later than scheduled to go to JFK. Jetblue likes to use their aircraft multiple times a day, but letting an E190 sit at ORH for 17 hours and not make money? Wonder what the decision was in that. And that was not because of mechanical issues, or anything like that, when I looked at flightradar24, the Jetblue mid day return flight and evening flight were already cancelled on Saturday morning for Sunday
For example, if you wanted to book a flight from Worcester to Nashville for June 22nd (when Delta's schedule changes to where American's time slot was). I could use delta and leave ORH at 5:30 and arrive to LGA at 6:31 then leave LGA to go to Nashville at 7:30 giving me a 59 minute layover. If that first flight is late departing Worcester, I am screwed because they don't even advertise it, but the delta connection flights land at a separate area from Delta's main hub because of construction going on at the terminal so you have to take a shuttle to go from the side area to the main. Last time I did a flight like that (but flying into ORH), it took me about a full hour to deplane, go from the gate I was at to find the shuttle, hop on the shuttle, then walk to my gate for the flight to ORH. Which isn't an issue for me to go faster next time because it was my first time at LGA but I could do it quicker now since I know where to go. But if your handicapped or need to use an elevator, you are screwed making that connection, and since there's no more flights after that to go from LGA to Nashville, I'm either spending the night at the airport or making another connection flight possibly. Another thing about LGA (and I am not sure if it was just this one time or if it's a daily thing), when I went to board the plane at LGA, everyone on the plane had to walk down a long pathway outside on the tarmac (probably about a fifth of a mile long) and there was no jet bridge so we had to use the steps to go up into the aircraft (the delta connection one). And there was an older couple on that plane and they were struggling to make it up the steps. It was due to the construction going on but if that's the same situation like it was back in January,(which I would imagine so because Delta's terminal isn't expected to be done till 2024 according to their website) I couldn't see certain people making it in less than an hour.
Don't believe any of that, Boston Herald also released a poll with the question "Will you continue to book Jetblue after all the recent cancellations?"
5% said "They can't control the weather,"
20% said "Unsure, I'm hesitant now,"
26% said "Yes, I still think it's the best airline,"
49% said "No, they're clearly unreliable."
People don't like to take second chances, and if Jetblue is delaying or cancelling so many flights and seems to be the only airline with that many delays or cancellations, their reputation is going to go down which will affect the JFK flights at Worcester. Especially since Delta likes to be competitive with prices up in Worcester with Jetblue.
Like I said before, I don't want the airport to go down in flames or ever lose any airlines, but if they want to expand, go with one that has a good reputation of on time flights and arrivals like Delta who in 2021, has 87.8% of flights arrive within 15 minutes of the scheduled time last year, not Jetblue where it was only 68.5%. There were even times back in the winter where the flight from FLL that was suppose to arrive at 1:13am (or around there) would arrive around 4am. No one is going to want to leave that late and arrive that late especially families with younger children. (Source for the on time performance just look up "Airline on time performance 2021")
I did a round-trip turn direct BOS to ATL this week. I normally would have used RH through New York to get to Atlanta, probably on Delta but given the recent problems I did not want to have a connection which doubled my chance of a problem with the flight
I flew BOS direct and we had a 3 hour delay at BOS. They announced it last minute so I was at the airport very early for no reason. The gate attendant said it was a mechanical problem and then waiting for a new pilot. On the plane, once in the air we got the real reason. The apologetic captain said that he and the first officer were called in on a day off because they had no other people to fly the plane. That was why we were delayed.
On the return flight from Atlanta it was supposed to go off at 6PM. I got an email from JetBlue at 6 am announcing a delay already. I had no confidence that this flight wouldn’t be canceled so I switched to a Delta flight (which was basically on time, though Delta has had its own lack of employees issues) .
It’s not just at ORH. JetBlue needs to get its act together, somehow. Wasting time trying to buy another airline seems to be a major distraction unless they are buying a large employee base and not just additional routes, gates and planes that they cwill not be able to operate