DALLAS (AP) – Travelers returning home from the July quarter getaways suffered flight delays on Monday, but airlines canceled fewer flights than the days before the holiday weekend.
Since holiday weekend travel resumed on Thursday, airlines have canceled more than 2,200 flights to the United States and a further 25,000 have been delayed.
The airports were full.
More than 9 million flyers arrived at U.S. airports between Thursday and Sunday, with a high of 2.49 million, a pandemic-era record on Friday, according to figures from the Transportation Security Administration.
As of late Monday afternoon on the east coast, more than 2,200 U.S. flights had been delayed and more than 200 canceled, according to FlightAware.
The good news: these numbers have dropped sharply in recent days.
Flying during the high holiday season has always been a challenge. Large crowds and summer storms can quickly overwhelm an airline’s operations. This has been exacerbated this summer by the shortage of pilots and other workers.
“It’s not just in North America, it’s everywhere,” said John Grant, an analyst at OAG, a travel-based provider based in the UK. “It’s a combination of available resources and demand that is growing much faster than anyone expected.”
Grant said labor shortages in Europe and North America have affected airlines, their suppliers, including catering and aircraft fuels, airports and air traffic controllers. He sees no reason to think the situation will improve at any time this summer.
In the United States, the cancellation rate over the past two weeks has increased by 59% over the same period in 2019, before the pandemic, probably due to a combination of time, staff shortages and air traffic problems. .
However, the rate of flight delays is only slightly worse than last summer before the pandemic: 19.7% then, 21.5% now, according to FlightAware numbers.
While some of the disruptions were due to bad weather, especially on the east coast during part of the weekend, the airlines also made unforced errors.
American Airlines accidentally abandoned pilot assignments for thousands of flights in July due to a failure in its programming schedule. An airline spokesman said Monday the problem had been resolved and crew allocations for “the vast majority” of flights had been restored. He said the problem had no effect on July fourth trips.
Ed Sicher, the new president of the union representing American pilots, said the airline had ignored his contract by unilaterally reassigning pilots to about 80% of affected flights.
Sicher said the union and the airline are negotiating an additional payment for pilots to whom the trips fell and then were restored during “this debacle.”