American Airlines canceling hundreds of flights in coming weeks due to labor shortages, ‘unprecedented weather’
A turbulent situation is causing American Airlines to cancel hundreds of flights over the coming weeks.
The airline blamed the sudden cancellations, which are expected to run through at least mid-July, on factors including labor shortages and bad weather, CNN reported.
“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 crew member schedules and our customers’ plans,” American Airlines representative Shannon Gilson told the news outlet.
“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.”
Air travel has increased in recent weeks, with Transportation Security Administration data showing that more than 2 million people have gone through United States airport checkpoints on a single day five times in June.
Before June, there hadn’t been a single day with 2 million travelers recorded by the TSA since March 2020, before the COVID-19 pandemic caused shutdowns throughout the U.S. Sunday marked the busiest day since the start of the pandemic, with 2,100,761 people screened.
More than 2.1 million air travelers sets single-day record for COVID pandemic, TSA says
American’s flight cancellations have already begun to take place, with 120 flights nixed on Saturday, according to CNN.
The airline expects that number to drop to between 50 to 80 cancellations per day, with the Dallas-Fort Worth hub being particularly impacted.
Ticket holders can expect to be alerted by American if a trip is canceled, if they haven’t been already.