Spirit cancels half its flights, American also struggling

Spirit Airlines cancelled more than half its schedule on Tuesday, and American Airlines struggled to recover from weekend storms at its Texas home, stranding thousands of passengers at the height of the summer travel season.

By early evening, Spirit had cancelled more than 400 flights, or nearly 60 per cent of its schedule, according to the FlightAware tracking service. Nearly 100 other flights were late. The blame appeared to lie at least partly with a technology outage affecting crew scheduling.

American Airlines had already cancelled nearly 350 flights. It is much larger than Spirit, so those flights amounted to 11 per cent of its schedule – still an unusually high rate.

About three-fourths of the American cancellations appeared to be due at least partly to a lack of pilots, according to a company log.

The disruptions at Spirit and American are just the latest examples of airlines scrambling to deal with an increase in travel this summer. Airlines have thousands fewer employees than they did before the pandemic, but United States air travel has recovered to about 80 per cent of 2019 levels.

A Spirit spokesman said the low-cost carrier was proactively cancelling some flights – dropping them before most passengers drive to the airport – to “reset” the operation.

“We’re working around the clock to mitigate the travel disruptions caused by overlapping operational challenges, including weather, system outages and staffing shortages in some areas of the operation,” spokesman Erik Hofmeyer said. “We’re working to provide refunds for cancellations and, when possible, to re-accommodate our guests” on other flights.

A person familiar with the situation said Spirit experienced an outage on Tuesday morning, affecting crew scheduling, preventing airline officials from rescheduling crews to cover gaps. The person, who was not authorised to speak publicly, said crews were stranded in many places around the country and unable to get to assigned flights.

On Monday, Florida-based Spirit scrapped more than 330 flights, or 42 per cent of its schedule, more than double the rate of American Airlines, the next poorest performer among major US carriers. Spirit cancelled about 20 per cent of its flights on Sunday.

American’s difficulties on Tuesday came after the airline cancelled about 560 flights, or 18 per cent of its schedule, on Monday and nearly 300 on Sunday, according to FlightAware. Most were at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport, where thunderstorms disrupted flights for several hours on Sunday.

The union representing American’s pilots accused the airline’s management of poor planning and not having enough employees.

American denied that it has a pilot shortage.

Southwest cancelled about two per cent of its flights on Tuesday, and other large US airlines had even lower cancellation rates, according to FlightAware. The numbers don’t count flights on smaller planes that are branded as American Eagle, United Express or Delta Connection.

Customers who called Spirit and American also complained about being put on hold for hours. Airlines received US$54 billion in taxpayer money to keep people employed through the pandemic but reduced staff anyway. Now they are adding call centre workers and filling other jobs.

– AP