My sister and brother-in-law are in Vegas. They arrived as we were leaving. Now they’re leaving, but late.
Are you having weather issues? Our flight to Milwaukee which starts in Orange County is delayed 2 hrs.
That was from my sister. Clear blue here. I went to work.
Everything is available nowadays–more than most people think. All flight data files with the FAA are online in real time.
I worked backwards. What plane heading to Vegas would be her chariot out?
She was wrong about the Orange County (SNA) flight. That flight is crazily late, around two hours, but it will go on to PHX and PIT, not MKE.
I checked her gate, C7. Working backwards, the last plane in that spot is headed to Las Vegas from Milwaukee. And that flight, Southwest 3012, is also behind schedule.
WN 3012 (I don’t know why Southwest’s official abbreviation is WN, but it is) started this morning in Oklahoma City, nine minutes late. It was 23 behind getting into Houston’s Hobby Airport.
The flight left Houston around a half hour late, but cut that in half arriving in Ft. Lauderdale.
The weather across Florida sucked today. Instead of their normally cellular thunderstorms, Floridians on-the-ground and jet pilots in-the-air are dealing with solid lines of thunderstorms slicing the peninsula.
Wheels up from FLL was an hour fifty eight minutes late! It had to be the weather. Alas, that’s too much to make up.
So, my sister and brother-in-law will have a few extra hours in Vegas. Good luck.
Thanks to FlightAware.com, FlightStats.com, McCarran.com, antonakis.co.uk, weather.cod.edu, flightradar24.com, fly.faa.gov and the Goog. Couldn’t have done it without you.
SW is used by Air Namibia
Employees kid that WN stands for ‘We’re Nuts’.
Not to uncommon for thundershowers this time of year over Florida – June through Sept is monsoon season. Most stations in Florida get about 70% of their annual rainfall in the summer months. Unlike the rest of the USA, winter is the dry season in Florida.
As you probably already know, Southwest actually has two abbreviated codes……It’s IATA Code is WN, and it’s ICAO code is SWA.
SWA used to belong to Seaboard World Airlines. My father flew for them until they merged with The Flying Tiger Line (FTL) and then merged again with FedEx. When Seaboard relinquished its ICAO code due to its merger, Southwest was granted its code.
As far as the genesis for WN, the most likely explanation is that it was a randomly generated code because the 2 letter IATA code SW was and continues to be used by another airline.
Please excuse my incorrect usage of the possessive “its”……I wrote my comment from Zurich, Switzerland, and it was 04:00am on my body clock, and my circadian rhythm was all messed up, especially after having just crossed the North Atlantic…..I hadn’t even been to sleep yet, and my fingers got the better of my brain……..and to quote the inimitable Rick Perry, “Oops!”