Spike In Demand, Staffing Issues Forces American Airlines To Cancel Hundreds Of Flights
LOS ANGELES (CBSLA) – Staffing issues and a surge in demand has forced American Airlines to cancel hundreds of flights this summer.
The airline confirmed to CBS News that it was forced to cancel 450 flights this past weekend. It is also canceling between 50 to 80 flights per day moving forward. American Airlines says this represents about 1% of its flight traffic.
The airline claims it is dealing with labor shortages and poor weather coupled with a spike in demand as the U.S. continues to open up and more people travel. It's unclear how long the cancelations will continue for.
Any passengers booked through July 15 will be notified if their flight has been canceled or adjusted.
Dallas Fort Worth International Airport, where American Airlines is based, is the airport most affected.
"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," the airline said in a statement to CBS News. "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."
On Sunday, the TSA screened more than 2.1 million people at airports nationwide, the highest checkpoint volume since the pandemic began. An internal TSA memo obtained by the Washington Post earlier this month revealed that 235 airports are understaffed by at least 5% when it comes to TSA officers.