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Three of the US’s biggest airlines have announced hundreds of flight cancellations as the federal aviation regulator prepares to throttle capacity at dozens of American airports due to staffing shortages worsened by the government shutdown.
United Airlines said on Thursday it would cancel 4 per cent of flights on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. This would represent fewer than 200 cancellations on Friday, according to a statement emailed to the Financial Times.
American Airlines said it would scrap about 220 flights a day from Friday to Monday, also representing a reduction of 4 per cent. Delta Air Lines said it would cancel about 170 flights on Friday.
Alaska Air, the US’s fifth-biggest carrier, said it had begun cancelling a “limited number of flights” on Friday.
The cancellations follow Wednesday’s announcement from the Federal Aviation Administration that capacity at 40 “high volume” airports would be cut by 10 per cent from November 7 to ease air traffic controllers’ workload, which has intensified due to the government shutdown.
The cuts mark the first widespread disruption for airlines as a result of the shutdown.
American Airlines, Delta and United said in statements that they expected to be able to operate the majority of their flights and that their long-haul international flights would not be affected.
Transportation secretary Sean Duffy said on Wednesday that prior to the government shutdown the air traffic control industry had been operating with a shortfall of about 2,000 people.
Controllers are among the hundreds of thousands of federal workers who have been furloughed since early October in the longest shutdown on record and have not been paid in recent weeks.
Duffy has said that some air traffic controllers were not turning up to work and instead taking “side jobs” to meet their household financial obligations, further stretching the resources of air control towers across the US.
The financial impact on airlines would increase if the government shutdown continues towards the Thanksgiving holiday and the traditional jump in travel.
Carriers were in a “low-season” period, according to Raymond James aviation analyst Savanthi Syth, so their “ability to reaccommodate passengers is higher, especially for airlines that have significant operations” at the affected airports.
“In turn, we see only modest earnings risk provided the shutdown does not extend to the Thanksgiving travel period,” she said in a note.
Earlier on Thursday, Air France-KLM said that the FAA reduction would have only a limited impact, as it was largely restricted to domestic flights.
“International flights as of today should be business as usual,” said chief executive Ben Smith.
However, Andrew Lobbenberg, airlines analyst at Barclays, said that the reduction “will probably have some indirect effects” on European carriers “as US airlines pull down domestic operations in the face of ATC problems”.
Earlier in the shutdown, Lufthansa chief Carsten Spohr warned that the airline had seen a drop-off in passengers catching connecting flights in the US before flying to Europe.
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