Southwest leads in flight cancellations
Dallas-based Southwest Airlines canceled more than 500 flights Friday morning among 2,200-plus nationwide airline cancellations Friday morning due to wintry weather on the East Coast and sick calls from the omicron variant of COVID-19.
Southwest canceled 519 flights by early Friday, United canceled 177 and Fort Worth-based American Airlines has already cut 161, according to flight-tracking website Flightaware.com. Regional carriers Republic and Skywest, which both fly for American among other carriers, cut another 470 flights combined. Jetblue cut 156 flights as well.
In fact, the nation’s six largest air carriers all had cut more than 100 flights by early Friday morning.
“Southwest Airlines made flight adjustments across the network for Friday in reaction to disruptions created by recent winter storms, which impacted several of our largest bases of operations throughout the past week, and ongoing staffing challenges,” Southwest Airlines spokesman Brian Parrish said in a statement. “Our focus is on stabilizing the operation so that we can offer a more reliable schedule as soon as possible.”
It’s been a trying two weeks for airlines, which first dealt with a surge in Covid-19-related sick calls before temperatures plunged across the country and have caused snowstorms from the Pacific Northwest to the Rocky Mountains and from the Midwest to New England.
Friday’s cancellations were concentrated on the New York and Boston regions, where a winter storm dubbed “Garrett” was dumping more snow on the area after moving through the Great Plains and Midwest. About a third of all flights in and out of Laguardia Airport in New York City were canceled Friday, 340 in all. Boston’s Logan International Airport saw another 242 flights cut, more than a quarter of the schedule in and out of there.
In some ways, the timing couldn’t be better for airlines, which are heading into their slowest period between the end of the Christmas holiday season and the spring break travel period in early March. U.S. airport traffic has dropped by about a quarter since the last major holiday travel day on Sunday, when more than 2 million people passed through TSA checkpoints, the agency reported. Just over 1.5 million people went through TSA checkpoints Thursday.
But airlines are still scrambling to get enough flight attendants and pilots to make sure they can get planes to their destinations. United, Spirit and Southwest Airlines began offering bonus pay to workers this week to cover January flights.
“Normally, we would start to feel some relief as we exit from our peak holiday schedule, but that has not yet happened — our operation continues to be challenged by wintery weather at our busier airports, and the pandemic has dealt the world another surge with the COVID-19 omicron variant,” Southwest said in a memo to workers last week.