American Airlines was forced to cancel hundreds of their flights over the weekend due to staffing constraints, maintenance, and other issues. As travel has begun to return to the pre-pandemic levels, the airline has continued to face challenges.
On Sunday, 190 flights were canceled, accounting for 6% of the airline’s mainline schedule, according to CNBC. In addition, the canceled flights attested for 3% of all of the total flights, including those operated by regional carriers, the airline said. CNBC also reported that about half of the canceled flights on Sunday were due to unavailable flight crews.
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On Saturday, approximately 4% of its mainline schedule was canceled, totaling 123 flights. On Monday, 106 flights were canceled, totaling 413 flights all together being canceled over the three-day span.
The Boston Herald checked in with passengers to see how their experience has been. Many were notified just before their flights were meant to depart that it had been canceled.
In an effort to ease the disruptions, American is planning to trim its overall schedule by 1% through mid-July. American has said that some of the disruptions it has had comes from the bad weather that Charlotte, North Carolina, and Dallas/Fort Worth international airport hubs during the first half of June.
“The bad weather, combined with the labor shortages some of our vendors are contending with and the incredibly quick ramp-up of customer demand, has led us to build in additional resilience and certainty to our operation by adjusting a fraction of our scheduled flying through mid-July,” said American Airlines spokeswoman Sarah Jantz in a statement. “We made targeted changes with the goal of impacting the fewest number of customers by adjusting flights in markets where we have multiple options for re-accommodation.”
Bad weather has been a substantial impact on how flight crews can get assigned to flights. When storms and other bad weather delay flights, it means that flight crews can fall outside of the hours they are federally allowed to work, the spokeswoman said.
The Transportation Security Administration said it screened more than 2.1 million people on Sunday, breaking all pandemic records. The 2.1 million was the most screened since March 7, 2020; however, this was still 23% below the 2.7 million people screened two years ago.
Shares of American were down about 1% in late-morning Monday trading while most other airlines were up with the rest of the broader market.
Airlines, in general, have been doing well as the travel restrictions have started to be removed across the globe. However, it has been a bit of a mad scramble after a year of cutting budgets and reducing their staff. With demand picking back up, customers are being met with long wait times as airlines return their staff to normal levels.