The next 24 hours will be make-or-break for American Airlines after five days of mass cancellations sparked by Winter Storm Fern. The carrier is now trying to avert a full-blown operational meltdown, but with cancellations piling up once again, getting things back on track on Wednesday will be crucial.
Already on Wednesday, the Fort Worth-based carrier has cancelled nearly 400 flights, according to data supplied by FlightAware. In contrast, Delta and United are starting the day without a single cancellation between them.
Still, the cancellation rate is, at least, an improvement on Tuesday when the airline cancelled more than 1,360 flights – more than every other airline in the world combined.
What’s surprising is that going into the weekend, American Airlines led the industry with proactive cancellations, slashing its schedule so that it could keep flight crews and aircraft in position and ready to resume a near-normal operation as soon as the worst of the storm started.
It turns out, however, that this plan failed miserably and American Airlines is still struggling to recover its operation.
While the root cause of the mass disruption is the severe winter weather, especially at its main hub at Dallas Fort Worth, like so many past operational meltdowns, flights are now being cancelled and delayed because American Airlines can’t track down its pilots and flight attendants.
How does this happen? Pilots and flight attendants who are on multi-sector trips get stuck out of sequence due to a delay or cancellation, and because they aren’t where they need to be, one cancellation cascades to several more throughout the airline’s network.
During normal operations, the airline’s operational planning teams have enough resources to keep track of stranded flight attendants, reassigning them to a new flight, and finding a replacement crew for the sector they didn’t make.
But during times of mass disruption, it becomes increasingly difficult to keep track of all these moving parts. In some cases, the system completely breaks because operational support teams become overwhelmed.
This appears to be where American Airlines is headed. There are multiple reports of flight attendants being left stranded in airports around the United States. When they attempt to call Crew Scheduling to let them know where they are and work out what to do next, they have been met with hold times of 10+ hours.
That has resulted in flight attendants sleeping in airport concourses, unable to get FAA-mandated rest in a proper bed, which causes even more issues as crew can’t legally work.
Desperate to get as many flight attendants back to work as possible, American Airlines has been offering double pay on both Tuesday and Wednesday, as a sweetener for crewmembers to give up their days off to work flights.
On Tuesday night, the Association of Professional Flight Attendants (APFA) warned that crew members are “bearing the brunt of the company’s inability to recover the operation in the aftermath of Winter Storm Fern.”
The union added: “Many are stranded with no hotels and broken sequences that the company has been unable to repair. Our Members deserve better.”
Chief executive Robert Isom, however, remains confident that the airline can get back on track, promising investors that American Airlines is the best in the business in recovering from operational disruption.
Wednesday will be a key test of this assertion.
