American Airlines Scrambles to Restore Air Travel as Hundreds More Flights Canceled Monday

Nov. 2, 2021

American Airlines canceled another 420 flights Monday and delayed 540 others as the Fort Worth-based carrier tried to get pilots, flight attendants and planes in the right places after a weekend of mass cancellations.

More than 40,000 customers were affected by Monday’s cancellations and delays throughout the airline’s nationwide network.

It came after American Airlines logged nearly 2,700 flight cancellations since Thursday, including Sunday’s 1,000-plus cancellations that sidelined more than a quarter of the airline’s mainline schedule. It all started with heavy winds in Dallas-Fort Worth on Thursday that forced the periodic closure of some runways at DFW International Airport, the carrier’s main hub. But the problems only got worse over the weekend, despite clear skies in Texas and most of the rest of the country.

Audrey Cefalu of McKinney, Texas, was forced to rent a car and drive 16 hours back to North Texas from Columbus, Ohio, after American Airlines canceled her family’s Sunday flight. Her 9-year-old daughter missed a highly anticipated night of trick-or-treating with friends.

She was packing for a return trip when she got a notice Sunday morning that a flight for her family had been canceled.

“My daughter cried for a long time because her and her friends [had] a whole zombie cheerleader theme planned,” Cefalu said.

The family of four packed into a small Mazda sedan, drove non-stop and arrived in McKinney around midnight. Cefalu, a school nurse, was able to take the day off but she let her kids, 9 and 6, sleep in with plans to take them to school late.

Cascading airline failures like this have become common since airlines began ramping up to accommodate eager leisure travelers. The industry, however, is down about 25,000 jobs compared with 2019, according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics.

American Airlines alone has about 7,000 fewer workers than it did two years ago and like other airlines has found it hard to recruit new workers amid a nationwide labor crunch.

Last weekend, American was most severely limited by a flight attendant shortage. American said it has 1,800 flight attendants coming back from pandemic leave on Nov. 1 and hundreds more on Dec. 1. There are also plans to have about 600 new flight attendant trainees by the end of December.

That’s all part of broader plans to hire about 4,000 new employees by the end of the year.

“The hiring of pilots and within tech ops continues to take place, and we already began ramping up hiring in reservations so more team members will be in place for the holiday season,” said a memo to American workers on Saturday from chief operating officer David Seymour.

The weekend troubles are eerily similar to problems that Dallas-based Southwest Airlines encountered over Columbus Day weekend in October, when thousands of flights were canceled after bad weather and air traffic control delays on a Friday afternoon in Florida.

That weather system, too, left a large number of Southwest crews and airplanes in the wrong places and it took five days for the airline to fully recover.

“Running an airline, there are always going to be weather problems that knock your back,” said Michael Boyd, an airline analyst with Boyd Aviation Group. “But what we are seeing is a failure to recover when it happens. They need to come up with a plan.”

American, Southwest and other airlines have tried to plan by repeatedly promising to reduce flight schedules after tumultuous stretches. Worker unions say those lessons are short-lived.

Unions say the problems are tiring for pilots and flight attendants who work long shifts and have trips rearranged to respond to issues.

“Flight attendant staffing at American remains strained and reflects what is happening across the industry as we continue to deal with pandemic-related issues,” said Paul Hartshorn, the spokesman for the Association of Professional Flight Attendants representing the carrier’s 24,000 flight attendants. “Flight attendant schedules are being disrupted to protect the operation to help our customers make it to their destinations.”

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