AA sees regular schedule after thousands of flights were scratched

An ongoing audit of airline safety inspections by the Federal Aviation Administration – triggered by the discovery last month that the system had broken down at Southwest Airlines – led to another huge wave of flight cancellations last week, mostly at American Airlines. And the FAA says its safety audits are expected to continue through the end of June – which could lead to more aircraft groundings as they progress. Last week, the focus was on American Airlines’ MD-80s, which comprise almost half of its mainline fleet. In order to conduct the required inspections of wiring, American canceled 460 flights on Tuesday (April 8), almost 1,100 on Wednesday, 930 on Thursday and almost 600 on Friday (April 11). The cancellations affected more than 250,000 passengers, to the point where rival AirTran Airways started scheduling extra DFW-Atlanta flights to help accommodate the backlog. There were also much smaller numbers of audit-related flight cancellations last week at Alaska Airlines and Midwest Airlines. American said it expected to have all MD-80 inspections completed by late Saturday (April 12), so it should be operated a normal schedule this week.

There were two big problems for affected travelers: First, the aircraft groundings and subsequent flight cancellations happened with little or no advance warning; and second, getting rebooked onto another flight was extremely difficult as major airlines continue to reduce their domestic schedules in the face of high demand, making planes more crowded than ever. During March, airline load factors (percentage of seats occupied) reached 84.5 percent on Delta’s domestic network, 83.4 percent for United’s North American operations, 85 percent for American’s U.S. flights -- and Northwest reported an amazing 88 percent load factor system-wide for the month.

American said last week it was working overtime to re-accommodate passengers whose flights were canceled, including “compensating those inconvenienced customers who stayed overnight in a location away from their final destination.” Some disgruntled airline executives charge that the FAA is overreacting in an effort to show Congress and the public that it is indeed doing its job after the debacle at Southwest, where an apparent cozy relationship between the regional FAA safety chief and maintenance officials at the airline led to repeated backsliding when it came to meeting the agency’s required safety inspections on the carrier’s big fleet of 737s.