American Airlines cancels hundreds of flights due to staffing crunch, maintenance issues.
American airline Airlines said it had canceled several flights this weekend due to staff shortages, care and other problems, challenges facing the airline as travel rises to pre-epidemic epidemics.
About 6% of the flight plan, or 180 airlines, was canceled on Sunday, according to FlightAware Airlines. About half of that was due to unavailable flight crews, showing a company list, which was viewed by CNBC. On Saturday, about 4% of flights, or 123, were canceled, the site showed.
The American said it had reduced its schedule by about 1% by mid-July to help alleviate some of the disturbances, some of which he said were caused by bad weather at its Charlotte and Dallas / Fort Worth International Airport malls during the first half of June.
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"Bad weather, coupled with the lack of jobs some of our retailers are facing and the dramatic increase in customer demand, has led us to build greater resilience and confidence in our operations by repairing a small portion of our mid-flight aircraft in July," American Airlines spokeswoman Sarah Jantz said in a statement. . "We have made the changes we were looking at with the aim of affecting the smallest number of customers by fixing the aircraft in the market where we have more residential options."
Bad weather has affected the flight attendants' ability to land on scheduled flights and bad weather could mean that crew could fall outside the permitted hours, said a spokesman.
Dennis Tajer, a spokesman for the Allied Pilots Association, which represents an estimated 15,000 U.S. pilots, said the company should devote more time ahead of time to encourage employees to complete and more flexibility in pilot programs to cover staff shortages.
"They're trying to put Band-Aid into something that needs to be sewn," said Tajer, who is also the captain of the Boeing 737.
The American is also rushing to train all pilots who have been enlightened between the two federal aid antitrust packages and their aviators who need to be trained from time to time. Jantz said the American was on track to complete the training of skilled pilots by the end of this month and added that the company was giving extra time due to operational problems.
Delta Air Lines canceled more than 300 flights last Thanksgiving weekend and many more over the Christmas period due to a shortage of pilots.
The weekend disruption, originally reported by View from the Wing flight blog, comes just as carriers are trying to catch up with increased travel demand and record losses. The U.S. said in a statement earlier this month it expected its second-quarter volume to drop by 20% to 25% since 2019, while United Airlines said it expected its capacity to drop by about 46% and Delta reported a decrease in -32% compared to 2019 Meanwhile, Southwest Airlines reported that its volume in July will drop by only 3% from 2019, a 7% drop this month.
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