JetBlue canceled or delayed more than 600 flights on Sunday, a quarter of them at Logan International Airport in Boston, as the airline’s operational struggles continued into a second week.
The company faced similar concerns last weekend when dozens of flights through Logan Airport were affected each day. A spokesperson for JetBlue blamed air traffic control issues and severe weather in parts of the country.
After a turbulent last weekend, the airline’s operations stabilized by Tuesday. But the disruptions appeared this weekend to be ongoing.
The 49 JetBlue flights canceled and 107 delayed at Logan Airport Sunday represented more than half the airline’s trips through Boston that day. Nationally, JetBlue saw 151 flights canceled and 484 delayed, according to the flight-tracking website FlightAware.
Another 100 JetBlue flights were affected Monday, the most of any American air carrier. Roughly 30 of the trips passed through Logan Airport.
A number of causes could be to blame, according to the Boston Globe. Brian Sumers, editor-at-large of the travel industry news site Skift, told the paper that weather can have a cascading effect on JetBlue’s fleet.
Many of the airline’s flights pass through Boston, New York and Florida — all hubs of severe weather.
“When JetBlue hits bad weather, it’s like a domino effect,” Sumers told the news outlet. “It can take them a long time to come back from that.”
In a visit to Boston last week, JetBlue CEO Robin Hayes faced pointed questions on his airline’s struggles during a trip meant to tout a new direct flight to London. Weather in Florida had certainly contributed to the disruptions of JetBlue flights in other parts of the country, he told the Globe in an interview.
“Nearly 50 percent of our flights touch Florida,” Hayes said Tuesday, according to the Globe. “And once you’ve had that amount of disruption, you have a number of crews and airplanes out of position.”
In internal emails on Saturday, JetBlue executives told employees that they were reducing summer flights to alleviate disruptions, CNBC reported. The company had already cut 8 to 10% of its May flights and expected to similarly scale back its operations for the rest of the summer, JetBlue COO and president Joanna Geraghty told staff, according to CNBC.
JetBlue is also in the process of hiring more than 700 people ahead of an expected busy summer travel spike, CNBC reported on March 25. In her email, Geraghty reportedly said the company had hired 2,500 people already this year and was still short-staffed.
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