PHOENIX – With more people traveling, there’s in increased demand for flights. However, some major airlines are struggling to keep up with post-pandemic travel.
With weather and staffing changes, American Airlines has been forced to cancel hundreds of flights, with more cuts on the way.
Over the weekend, TSA screened more than two million travelers at security checkpoints over the last four days, indicating that people are feeling safe to hit the skies again.
“It feels good,” said one traveler. “It feels normal.”
As this increase continues, American Airlines has been forced to cancel more than 300 flights over the weekend due to bad weather. This is impacting crew schedules, and a big rise in customer demand is causing them to adjust.
“On several days throughout the past weeks, we’ve experienced multi-hour ground stops that have had a serious impact not only on our aircraft routing, but also our crew routing,” officials said in a statement.
The airline announced they would be cutting flights to avoid any strain in their operations. This was decided after storms nationwide hit major hubs for the airline, causing delays and cancellations. This also allows for a bigger pool of pilots on reserve to pick up the load.
Luckily, for travelers at Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport today, things seemed to be running more smoothly.
The airline plans to cut about 1% of flights during the first half of July to provide employees the flexibility to respond to problems when they arise. Luckily, Sky Harbor is not one of the airports affected heavily by this.
“Everything has been done, everything has been normal,” one Sky Harbor visitor said.
The full statement by American Airlines:
The first few weeks of June have brought unprecedented weather to our largest hubs, heavily impacting our operation and causing delays, canceled flights and disruptions to crewmember schedules and our customers’ plans. That, 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. 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.
Our focus this summer — and always — is on delivering for our customers no matter the circumstance. We never want to disappoint and feel these schedule adjustments will help ensure we can take good care of our customers and team members and minimize surprises at the airport.
While this is happening, Delta Airlines is announcing a hiring boom and are looking to hire more than 1,000 pilots by next summer.
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