When the head of schedule planning at American Airlines, Jay Gargas, stepped off the plane in Dallas-Fort Worth after an 18-hour journey from Istanbul last Wednesday, he faced chaos.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy was telling the country that, come Friday, Nov. 7, flights would be cut 10% at 40 key airports in order to ease pressure on an air-traffic control system that, 30-plus days into the longest-ever federal government shutdown, was under crippling stress.
“The first mood was chaos,” says Gargas. What they knew: Robert Isom, the CEO of American, would meet with Duffy at 5:30 p.m. “What we needed to do was create a definition of what the requirements were going to be. We needed to know what exactly was going to be required in order to put the puzzle together.”
By 8 p.m. that evening, Gargas and his team, fueled by countless cups of coffee and pizza delivery, knew where and by how much they needed to cut American’s schedule of around 6,100 daily flights in about 36 hours. They went to work making those reductions happen and, by around 11:30 p.m. that night, had a schedule in hand for American’s operations center to implement on Friday.
All that work was done methodically to ensure American can return to its full schedule quickly whenever the government shutdown ends. Flights flown by its regional affiliates — those on smaller planes under the “American Eagle” banner — and ones to non-hub domestic destinations were pruned to minimize disruptions to both customers and crew.
For example, on Friday, American cancelled one of its 11 daily flights between Dallas-Fort Worth and San Antonio but kept its 12 daily flights between its hubs in Dallas-Fort Worth and Chicago, Cirium schedule data shows. “Hub-to-hub is the lifeline to the airline in order to move crew and more people around,” says Gargas.
According to Cirium, in the two months before the shutdown (August and September), American Airlines was, on average, cancelling about 1% of flights a day or about 75 flights. In October, the carrier averaged just 0.6% of flights cancelled, or about 37 flights a day.
Executives at other major U.S. airlines who were not authorized to speak publicly also described the time around Duffy’s announcement as chaotic and similar to the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic. While the flight cuts five years ago were in response to border closures and the decision by most would-be travelers to stay home, these were the result of critical air traffic controllers working unpaid through the government shutdown.
A picture of disarray
The disarray is understandable. Major airline executives were only notified about 30 minutes before Duffy’s announcement of the cuts, reported The Air Current, an aviation trade publication. And airports, even those among the 40 where flights were being cut, were left in the dark. “The Greater Orlando Aviation Authority has not received official notification from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) regarding a decrease in flight activity in response to the federal government shutdown,” Orlando International Airport posted on X at 5 p.m. on Thursday, Nov. 6.
Orlando was among the 40 affected airports when the FAA released its official order around 7:30 p.m. on Thursday. The other airports include everything from major hubs like Atlanta and Denver, popular but constrained fields in New York and Washington, D.C., and even far flung airports in Anchorage and Honolulu.
The FAA’s order outlined a phased implementation. Flights would be cut by 4% from Friday; 6% from Tuesday, Nov. 11; 8% from Thursday, Nov. 13; and finally 10% from Friday, Nov. 14.
And, on Sunday, the National Business Aviation Association trade group said that the FAA would restrict private planes at 12 of the country’s busiest airports beginning Monday, Nov. 10.
No corner of the country was left untouched by the reductions as they rippled out from major hubs to places like Bakersfield, Calif., and Corpus Christi, Texas.
Airlines cancelled 4,978 flights from Friday-through-Sunday, according to data from aviation analytics firm Cirium. This includes disruptions for weather, aircraft maintenance and air traffic control staffing. Another 1,623 flights in the U.S., or 6.3% of the total, were cancelled on Monday by midday, Cirium data shows.
(Still) prepared for the worst
Neither American nor any other U.S. airline is taking a chance on when the shutdown will end, even with a funding deal making its way through the Senate.
The carrier has loaded cancellations in its schedule through Wednesday, Nov. 12, and is prepared to add cancellations for Thursday, Nov. 13, given the uncertainties around when — and if — Congress could pass the bill.
“There was concrete progress last night on a deal, but there are many steps ahead, and the next several days will continue to be challenging,” says David Seymour, chief operations officer at American, in a letter to staff on Monday warning of continued flight disruptions.
When the government does reopen and the FAA rescinds the flight reductions, Gargas says American can return to something near a normal schedule as soon as the next day. The exception: Some cancellations are related to run-of-the-mill weather — there was a snowstorm in Chicago over the weekend, for example — or aircraft maintenance that could ripple through its schedule for several days.
Delta Air Lines and United Airlines took a similarly methodical approach to cancelling regional and non-hub flights to minimize disruptions. The three airlines also continued to fly their full international schedules.
And, despite the initial confusion, the messaging to airline staff was one of order.
“Thanks to many similar challenges we’ve faced before with weather and other disruptions, our crew scheduling team has become quite expert at processing these volumes of cancellations efficiently to minimize disruption to our flight crews,” wrote United executives Marc Champion, vice-president of flight operations, and Rob Thomas, vice-president of flight operations planning and development, to the airline’s pilots in a letter on Nov. 6 viewed by Fast Company.
Pilots at three major airlines described the notifications from their employers as similar to what they receive during irregular operations like a snowstorm.
“The 737 MAX grounding and COVID really helped these kinds of chaos situations,” says Gargas. “You learn quickly on what the art of the possible is.”