The FlightAware location service showed that around 2,200 flights had been canceled worldwide as of Monday evening. Only 380 of those cancellations were to, from, or within the United States, accounting for less than 2% of all US scheduled flights.
That’s fewer than Sunday’s 2,700 global cancellations. The situation improved even more for US flights as it receded from more than 800 flights canceled on Sunday. From Thursday through Sunday, more than 5,000 US flights were canceled by airlines, accounting for about 5% of their flight schedule.
Since June 16 was a national holiday on Monday and Father’s Day on Sunday, there was heavy traffic at the airports over the weekend.
The 2.4 million travelers screened by TSA at US airports on Friday were the most in one day so far this year, up 17% from the Friday before Father’s Day last year. While this traffic is still 12% below 2019 levels, it is more than four times as many travelers ahead of Father’s Day weekend 2020.
The number of flights airlines can schedule has been limited due to staff shortages. The major US airlines all offered buyouts and early retirement packages to reduce staffing levels in the first year of the pandemic as demand for air travel plummeted. They’ve had trouble getting those employees back to pre-pandemic levels, in part because it takes time to train and qualify new employees to fill pilot, flight attendant, and mechanic positions. According to aeronautical analysis company Cirium, there are 13% fewer domestic flights available in June than in June 2019.
Tight staffing and scheduling has limited airlines’ ability to recover from bad weather events like those that hit across the country last week. Recently, there have been similar spikes in flight cancellations during other holiday travel periods, including Memorial Day weekend and the end of the year bank holiday.The limited number of flights and strong passenger demand have pushed up air fares. Leisure fares are up 42% year over year for the week ended June 6, according to a pricing analysis by Cowen of the country’s three largest airlines – American, United and Delta. The Consumer Price Index, the government’s leading measure of inflation, estimates that overall fares rose 37.8% year-on-year in May and 21.7% compared to pre-pandemic May 2019.
Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported the number of global flight cancellations for Sunday. There were 2,700.