In 1998, I worked for a while on the flight cancelation software for United Airlines. The number of factors that come into play in determining which flights should get canceled for, e.g., bad weather is fascinating (flights are always canceled in pairs so that planes and crew won’t have to deadhead to be where they need to be). The one that sticks with me the most was that having a high-milage frequent flier on a flight would make that flight less likely to be canceled.
Getting crew around is a interesting problem, it is not long ago that the railways in the Netherlands had to stay still for a day because their crew planning software had broken. And as I understand getting it to match up is a pretty big NP-complete problem so it can take long time to solve it.
I once sat next to a SkyWest pilot on a flight. I was asking him how they assigned pilots and crews to flights. He told me that they actually had an internal auction system where crew members bid on "trips". A "trip" is a sequence of several flights over the course of a few days to a week that will all be crewed by the same people. Individual employees were allocated "money" to bid with (not real money, of course) according to seniority, so more senior crew would almost always get the most favorable trips, e.g. those composed entirely of non-redeye flights, etc.
Just to be clear, this was the software that made the decision about cancellation? (Otherwise, it would be somewhat expected that flights of frequent fliers are less likely cancelled. I suppose they learn to avoid those flights.)
It was the software for flight cancellations. The variables that go into the decision making are such that it would be difficult for anyone on the outside to predict what the most likely flight to be canceled would be.
Interestingly, there was a case of this with my wife’s trip to Mexico where her flight on Aeromexico departed on Thursday while a united flight at the same time was canceled since they couldn’t guarantee that the return flight would be able to travel in a timely fashion.
