why is my air always late
Short answer: One of a number of headache-inducing reasons.
Long answer: It could be any number of things.
First and foremost, we are critically understaffed here, both 2DA and 1DA. 1DA especially feels the crunch. There simply aren't enough sleep-deprived college students in the city of Louisville to meed the needs of the operation. 2DA ramp has been getting more hours than they can shake a stick at (we've been averaging near 40 a week since the start of the month) due to volume and turnover. We get the $150/week bonus for new hires here in air district; that hasn't been sitting well for the folks who have been here a few years and morale is starting to bottom out.
If your gateway is one that receives regular MD-11 service (MKE, ONT, DFW, MCO) it's probably because we have to tail-swap them (switch all the volume from a broken plane to a not-broken plane). MD-11s are temperamental birds that are prone to random mechanical failures. Also we have to load the planes a certain way to keep them from tipping on their tails like so:
If your gateway is in the Northeast, specifically PHL or EWR, the plane is probably on ATC hold. Those two airports serve as major hubs for passenger airlines and so to avoid passengers missing connections, we have to hold our birds on the ground at SDF to make sure those passenger planes have priority in landing. Sometimes we rush to load a plane only to have it sit on the ground for three hours before takeoff.
Import/Export can hold volume to run scans or searches, making everything behind them late. We might be sitting on a plane waiting for one canister of packages that's being held up for an hour or more. If hub loaded a canister incorrectly (or in a broken canister, a "red tag"), someone has to reload it, and that can also cause delays.
Or it could be that the holdup is at the arrival gateway. In which case, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
