Midway to denver

[Nrichard81]

Again I am sitting in midway MDW waiting on my delayed flight. Each time I’m told weather and that this is a small airport. When does it come not acceptable to blame all delays on weather. If there are that many weather issues coming into MDW southwest should look into another airport. I travel for work and recently moved my main airline to southwest please let me regret it. I also have other co worker that is also having the same issue with southwest and this airport. What is southwest doing to correct this?

[chgoflyer]

Keep in mind that "weather" is more disruptive to a point-to-point system such as Southwest's than it is to a "spoke-and-hub" one like most other carriers. The weather issue affecting your flight could literally be anywhere in the Southwest system that your plane was/is scheduled to be today -- it's not just limited to your departure or arrival city. I don't believe MDW has more actual weather delays on average than any other airport -- in my experience it's actually less prone to weather delays than O'Hare, for example. But your chance of "weather" being an issue on a Southwest flight is higher than it is on other carriers, IMO. (It's another discussion entirely about the overall extent of actual weather issues on a point-to-point vs a hub-and-spoke system, but I do think that there are winners and losers in both cases.)

[dfwskier]

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@chgoflyer wrote:

Keep in mind that "weather" is more disruptive to a point-to-point system such as Southwest's than it is to a "spoke-and-hub" one like most other carriers. The weather issue affecting your flight could literally be anywhere in the Southwest system that your plane was/is scheduled to be today -- it's not just limited to your departure or arrival city. I don't believe MDW has more actual weather delays on average than any other airport -- in my experience it's actually less prone to weather delays than O'Hare, for example

As mentioned above. weather could be affecting your flight at  places other than Midway. Right now there is rain stretching from Houston to Atlanta and then up the east coast to NYC.

Also it apoears that a  front just rolled thru Minneapolis. Weather in any of those places is going to affect flights to/from those places (on Southwest and everyone else..  You've heard the downside of a point to point system above. There is an upside when bad weather strikes. If you are flying a connection from say Salt Lake City to St Louis on lets say United and there's weather in Denver, you are basically outta luck. On Southwest on the other hand, a Southwest connection could be routed thru 5 or more other cities to get you to St Louis

Hope you are on your way soon.

[DancingDavidE]

I sometimes use FlightAware to see where planes are coming from, how delays are affecting the network:

https://flightaware.com/live/findflight?origin=KMDW&destination=KDEN