American Airlines continued their days-long trend of canceling flights with another 250 on Monday morning, according to a CNN report.
Monday’s flight cancellations bring the airline total over 2,000 during the last four days.
The airline said it canceled a total of 1,058 flights on Sunday, which was a continuation of Saturday’s 548 canceled flights and Friday’s 343 canceled flights, according to the report.
Canceled Sunday flights alone were roughly one in every five flights in the four-day stretch. Approximately ten percent of its mainline flights ended up canceled, which in return stranded thousands of passengers.
American COO David Seymour, in an internal memo, said that the airline is “proactively canceling” flights “to provide scheduling certainty for their crews,” which they have had to do “for the last few days this month.” The report said that “1,800 flight attendants are returning from pandemic time-off” starting Monday.
The report insisted that the airlines were struggling with staffing shortages when the “pandemic brought air travel to a near halt in 2020,” noting that “airlines offered staff buyouts, early retirement packages and unpaid leave to cut costs and survive the downturn.”
However, while airline travel is picking up, “all the airlines are scrambling to hire employees and bring back as much staff as possible.”
The airline unions claim that the “service disruptions are due to bad management decisions and flawed scheduling systems. And they say that the problems will not end with this weekend’s woes.”
Capt. Dennis Tajer, an American Airlines pilot and spokesman for the Allied Pilots Association, recently said that the unions are concerned about how the airlines will take care of the surge in passengers over the holiday season this year.
“We want that flying to get done, but we don’t want tickets sold that can’t be fulfilled,” he said. “Are they biting off more they can they chew?”
Jacob Bliss is a reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow him on Twitter.