More than 4.5 million travelers flooded US airports on Friday and Saturday, with a total of 13 million air travelers expected to have flown into, out of or within the United States by the end of this July 4 weekend.
However, for many of these passengers, travel plans have been turned upside down due to flight delays and cancellations due to booming travel demand combined with widespread staff shortages. According to FlightAware, a flight tracking website, airlines flying within, to or from the United States canceled more than 1,400 flights from Friday through Sunday, stranding and upsetting some passengers who were leaving for the long-awaited summer vacation. In addition, more than 14,000 US flights were delayed this holiday weekend, according to the website.
The experience was frustrating for some US airline passengers. According to FlightAware, 1,048 — or 29 percent — of Southwest Airlines flights were delayed as of Saturday, as were 28 percent of American Airlines flights. United Airlines and Delta Air Lines had similar problems, with 21 percent and 19 percent of their flights being delayed, respectively. On Sunday, in the middle of the Bank Holiday weekend, travelers seemed to get a break from the worst of their troubles, with about three-quarters the delays and half as many cancellations as the previous day.
As of 7 a.m. Eastern Monday, US airports were experiencing more than 400 delays and 100 cancellations.
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 bank holiday weekend, he said, it was about 30 percent. “It’s a little bit worse than usual,” he said.
As airlines face pilot shortages, poor weather conditions and air traffic control delays, some appeared to be struggling to handle passenger volumes that were approaching, or in some cases exceeding, pre-pandemic levels. On Friday, the Transportation Safety Administration screened more passengers — 2.49 million people — than any other day this year. That surpassed the 2.18 million travelers screened as of July 1, 2019, before the pandemic.
Still, travel to and from airports in the United States seemed to be going better than in many other parts of the world. On Sunday, airlines had delayed about half of all flights from Toronto Pearson International Airport, Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris and Frankfurt Airport, while about 40 percent of flights from London Heathrow were delayed.
On Monday, Australian airports were hit hard, with nearly 60 per cent of flights departing from Sydney Airport being delayed, while airports in Brisbane and Melbourne fared not much better. SAS, the Scandinavian airline, said Monday its pilots’ union had called a strike over pay that would result in the cancellation of 50 percent of its flights, affecting about 30,000 passengers a day. The loss-making airline, which operates as the national carrier of Denmark, Norway and Sweden, described the move as “devastating”.
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