More than 4.5 million passengers flooded U.S. airports on Friday and Saturday, with a total of 13 million air travelers to, from or within the United States expected to have passed by the end of this year. of the week of July 4th.
However, for many of these passengers, travel plans were altered due to flight delays and cancellations caused by a rise in travel demand along with widespread staff shortages. From Friday to Sunday, airlines flying in, inside or outside the United States canceled more than 1,400 flights, according to FlightAware, a flight tracking website, trapping and angering some passengers heading for a vacation. long-awaited summer. In addition, more than 14,000 U.S. flights were delayed this holiday weekend, according to site data.
The experience has been frustrating for some passengers on American carriers. On Saturday, 1,048 — or 29 percent — of Southwest Airlines flights were delayed, as were 28 percent of American Airlines flights, according to FlightAware. United Airlines and Delta Air Lines had similar problems, with 21% and 19% of their flights delayed. On Sunday, in the middle of a holiday weekend, travelers seemed to have a respite from the worst of problems, with about three-quarters of the delays and half of cancellations than the day before.
As of 7 a.m., Eastern Time on Monday, there were more than 400 delays and 100 cancellations at U.S. airports.
In a typical month, about 20 percent of flights are delayed or canceled, according to Robert W. Mann Jr., a former airline executive who now heads airline consultancy RW Mann & Company. But this holiday weekend, he said, was about 30 percent. “It’s a little worse than usual,” he said.
As airlines face a shortage of pilots, bad weather and delays in controlling air traffic, some seemed to have difficulty managing the volume of passengers approaching or, in some cases, exceeding previous levels. to the pandemic. On Friday, the Transportation Security Administration examined more passengers (2.49 million people) than on any other day this year. This exceeded the 2.18 million travelers examined on July 1, 2019, before the pandemic.
Still, round trips to airports in the United States seemed to go better than to many other parts of the world. On Sunday, airlines had delayed about half of all flights departing from Toronto’s Pearson International Airport, Paris’s Charles de Gaulle Airport and Frankfurt Airport, while about 40 percent of flights from London Heathrow were delayed.
On Monday, Australian airports were hit hard, with almost 60 per cent of flights departing from Sydney airport with delays, while Brisbane and Melbourne airports did not fare much better. SAS, the Scandinavian airline, said on Monday that its pilots’ union had called for a pay strike, which would lead to the cancellation of 50 per cent of its flights, affecting about 30,000 passengers a day. The losing company, which serves as the national airline for Denmark, Norway and Sweden, called the move “devastating”.
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