American Canceling Flights, but Weather Is Only Part of It

With business booming thanks to people eager to travel after more than a year of COVID-19 restrictions, American Airlines is ... cutting flights? Yes, that's right. As the Wall Street Journal explains, the more flights an airline offers, the more potential there is for trouble if something goes awry. The newspaper calls the summer of 2019 "disastrous" for the airline thanks to bad weather and problems with mechanics, and says American made the decision to cut back this year after storms this month caused delays and cancellations at the airline's biggest hubs. Nearly a thousand flights have been cancelled, but overall that only totals about 1% of flights planned for the first half of July.

The recent weather issues, "combined with the labor shortages some of our vendors are contending with and the incredibly quick ramp up of customer demand, has led us to build in additional resilience and certainty to our operation by adjusting a fraction of our scheduled flying through mid-July," a spokesperson tells CNN. There were 120 flights cancelled Saturday and 176 Sunday, and 50 to 80 per day are expected going forward. Most customers will still be able to make it to their destination on the same day they had originally planned, the airline says, but some will see their itineraries changed or their reservation refunded entirely if the rescheduled flights don't work for them. (More American Airlines stories.)