Airlines do lie, but don't make the mistake of assuming that a weather delay is necessarily caused by proximate bad weather. Patrick Smith of Ask the Pilot wrote a good article about how it's not just your airport and flight path that matter.

"When storms or other inclement weather impacts an area, traffic backs up and routings become saturated. Flights are put into queue and assigned slot times. Even if conditions clear up, it can take a while for the logjam to disperse. To help expedite departures, many crews will be asked to fly routes other than those initially planned. When that happens, fuel, passenger and cargo loads all can be affected, and much of the original flight plan data needs to be recalculated and/or amended -- everything from anticipated fuel burn to which airports can be legally designated as alternates."

Talk about delays...Last year I read about one time when a single thunderstorm cell over Schenectady, NY caused weather delays over the ENTIRE EAST COAST!!!

Obviously the "system" is broken whenever something such as this occurs!

Elliott is quite wrong when he asserts that no audit of delays is done; daily audits are done by the FAA on all Ground Delay Programs (GDPs) run in the US, most of which are conducted in response to weather events. Audits are performed the next day at both the national and regional level by air traffic control managers in charge of decision-making about aviation response to weather events. Additionally, statistics tracking recoverable and unrecoverable delay in GDP situations are compiled on a monthly basis and released to all ATC participants as well as to all airlines in the US. See http://cdm.fly.faa.gov/ad/gdp.html for stats, and ask me to explain the meaning if you like, since I spent years inside the ATCSCC supporting the controllers running the show. It is the FAA that makes weather-related delay decisions, by the way...not the airlines, although the airlines participate in facilitated discussions about how much delay the FAA will apply, when, and where.

SG, you're wrong. Point blank I asked an ATC (step-father) if they are responsible for calling weather delays. The answer ... "No, that's not our job, it's the pilot's call."