American’s cancelled flights portend messy holiday travel

Bloomberg

The razor-thin staffing that contributed to thousands of canceled US passenger flights in October doesn’t bode well for smooth holiday travel.
American Airlines Group Inc scrapped about 1,900 flights since Saturday, including 302 by November 1, as cancellations continued to ripple from the disruption of flights by high winds at its main hub near Dallas. Just three weeks ago, Southwest Airlines Co sparked customer ire when it canceled 3,100 flights over four days because of storms and interrupted air traffic control. Southwest said it needed to hire more workers to ward off more disruptions.
Airlines have been caught off guard by the rapid rebound of travel demand and the need to staff up enough to serve them after tens of thousands took early retirement or extended leaves during the pandemic.
“We are very concerned about the upcoming holiday travel season,” Dennis Tajer, an American captain and spokesman for the Allied Pilots Association union said. “They are setting up all the dominoes. All it’s going to take is the finger tip of Mother Nature to send those tumbling.”
For American, those dominoes were toppled last week, when three out of the five runways at Dallas/Fort Worth International airport were closed because of high winds. The airline said it canceled 1,060 flights on Sunday — nearly 21% of its schedule, and more than 10% for the period of October 29 through Monday.
Airline schedules are complex and interdependent, which means delays can ripple through the system and grow in magnitude as they do. Because federal law restricts how many hours a pilot may work, it means that substitute flight crews will be needed if flights run too late. If backup crews are in short supply — particularly at the end of a month — airlines have no choice but to cancel flights.
The disruption at American continued as the carrier worked to get its schedule back in order, with company saying it had 302 cancellations, or 5.4% of its schedule.
Last week saw the highest
average daily number of passengers outside of brief holiday-weekend peaks since the start of the pandemic in March 2020, according to Transportation Security Administration data. American is hiring
pilots, flight attendants and support staff to prepare for more passengers, COO David Seymour said.

The airline networks are more “brittle” because of staff cuts after the pandemic and lockdowns reduced passenger counts, said Samuel Engel, senior vice president of the aviation group at consultant ICF. He also cited a different mix of traveller — more tourists and fewer business passengers — that may not match up with staffing at airports. Miami is getting more flights now than Cleveland, for example, he said. Plus, he said, the weather is also getting more extreme, which increases cancellations.
“The underlying forces are going to be with us for a while,” Engel said. “The airline management will get more and more adept at mitigating the impacts.”
American is hiring pilots, flight attendants and support staff to prepare for more passengers, Chief Operating Officer David Seymour wrote in a letter to employees. The airline was expected to have almost 1,800 flight attendants returning from leave and another 600 newly hired will be on the job by the end of December. The company is also bringing on 4,000 support workers during the final three months of the year, he wrote.
“We continue to staff up across our entire operation and we will see more of our team returning in the coming months,” Seymour said in the letter.
The plan to hire workers is easier said than done, union spokesman Tajer said. American wants to add more than 2,500 pilots but there’s a lack of instructors and flight simulators to do that quickly. Support staff is difficult to find because of a general labor shortage and rising wages for competing jobs, he said.
“We don’t know how in the world they make 2 plus 2 equal 10,” Tajer said.