Flight Attendants Are Sleeping On Airport Floors — American Airlines Has Lost Track Of Crews While They Cancel Nearly 10,000 Flights

American Airlines led the world in cancellations on Saturday, Sunday, Monday and today so far. In total, they’ve cancelled about 9,000 total flights. That’s more than Delta cancelled in summer 2024 after the CrowdStrike outage. It’s not yet as many as Southwest cancelled across the 2022 December holiday period, but American isn’t done yet.

• Today alone, American has cancelled over 1,400 flights (still)
  
• The next-highest total is Delta at 360
  
• Nobody else has cancelled even 100

This started as weather, and the winter storm certainly affected American’s hubs in New York, Philadelphia, Charlotte and Dallas. But when things are this bad – and when they continue liek this – it usually goes beyond weather. And it’s no longer just crew and planes ‘out of position’ to operate flights.

• Things go bad when airlines lose track of their crews. They can’t pair crews with flights when they don’t know who is where and available. And while it may have been a bit of tempting fare, this wasn’t supposed to happen at American.

• Just this month, Chief Operating Officer David Seymour called American “better than anyone else” at irregular operations recovery. He describes their operations as “careful choreography.”

Aviation watchdog JonNYC reports from one American source,

It’s a disaster worse than I’ve ever seen. Crews lost for days, stuck in airports without hotels for 12+ hours. I know FAs that are stuck in cities, scheduled to work other trips, and scheduling has no idea until the flight is scheduled to depart and they don’t show up. Crews can’t get through because phone lines keep crashing, and then flights cancel for lack of pilots and FAs…

The airline, he reports, “can’t find where [flight attendants] are” and that pilots and planes are sitting ready to go, but don’t have flight attendants.

• Part of the issue seems to be that they’ve taken “away the ability for crews to self book hotels during IROPS” and it’s taking so long to get flight attendants hotel rooms when they’re stuck (if they get them).
  
• The hotel desk books them hours later, and so flight attendants aren’t eligible to fly because they haven’t had the required rest – but that information doesn’t get relayed to crew scheduling.

Lots of reports of flight attendants sleeping on airport floors.

"had two friends i know of sleep in airport floors last night after being on hold with crew scheduling for hotels for over 8+ hours. one in ORD (a hub) and one in FLL (a satellite base) insanity and they should be ashamed. i know one of my friends was in tears after 12 years…

— JonNYC (@xJonNYC) January 27, 2026

As one American Airlines flight attendant put the experience on the ground:

In response, one crewmember offers “I’ve been stuck in St. Louis for five days. My schedule says I’m back in Charlotte, but I’m not.” And another,

Spent my third night in Phoenix and we are looking at a fourth tonight. Luckily our hotel is accommodating us until noon tomorrow. We are LOST in the system with no end in sight.

American has had a problem with failing to provide rooms for flight attendants before. They’ve known about the issues with their outsourced vendor. And they supposed took steps so it would never happen again like buying room blocks in key cities that would go unused, as a backup just in case, allowing managers to book hotels when needed, increased vendor staffing and bringing American employees in to back up that staffing too. But it’s still a problem for the airline, which has also done quite a bit of cost-cutting in IT.