March 10--Winter storms caused American Airlines to cancel more than 14,000 flights in February, the Fort Worth-based carrier said Monday.
Canceled flights were up 149 percent compared to February 2013. For the first two months of 2014, American said it had canceled about 28,000 flights, which is a 164 percent increase over January and February of 2013.
"The company believes the weather-related cancellations had a slightly positive impact on unit revenue but had a larger negative impact on unit cost and first-quarter profitability," American said in its monthly traffic report.
American said passenger traffic rose slightly, up 0.5 percent in February as the carrier increased capacity 0.8 percent in the month.
Its load factor dropped 0.3 percentage points to 78.4 percent
The carrier said it expects unit revenues to be up 2 to 4 percent in the first quarter of 2014 and will disclose its weather impact on profitability in early April.
Separately, American and JetBlue Airways announced that the two airlines will no longer sell tickets on each other's networks for select flights out of New York and Boston.
The companies will also end their frequent flyer agreement that allowed customers to earn miles or points on certain routes operated on the other airline.
The end of these agreements is effective April 1.
The American-JetBlue partnership, announced in March 2010, allowed Jet Blue customers to connect to American's international flights out of Boston and New York's JFK Airport while American customers were able to connect to JetBlue flights to domestic cities where the two carriers didn't compete, such as JFK to Portland, Maine, or Nantucket, Mass.
Andrea Ahles, 817-390-7631 Twitter: @Sky_Talk
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