Travel has returned with a vengeance as airlines struggle to rebuild networks that were ravaged by the COVID-19 pandemic. Nearly 50M U.S. airport passengers were registered in May - up 19% from April - and so far in June, the TSA has recorded nearly 35M travelers. But that's causing some disruptions, with carriers and transportation operators struggling to keep up with the ramp up in demand, especially with the lifting of travel restrictions.
Case in point: American Airlines (NASDAQ:AAL)cancelled about 120 flights on Saturday and 176 on Sunday (about 6% of its mainline operation that day). While some were called off a few days in advance, about half of those were because of "unavailable flight crews." Other reasons included maintenance and other disruptions, like inclement weather.
"The bad weather, 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," American Airlines spokeswoman Sarah Jantz said in a statement. "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."
Fixing the situation: The Allied Pilots Association, which represents American's roughly 15,000 pilots, said the carrier should offer more overtime in advance to cover staffing shortages. The current situation is also daunting given that American Air has taken an aggressive approach throughout much of the pandemic to fly much more than its closest competitors - United (NASDAQ:UAL) and Delta (NYSE:DAL). All the while, it has been racing to train the aviators it furloughed after the two federal coronavirus aid packages that prohibited layoffs, as well as its pilots who are due for periodic training.