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 like 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.
Hope they get better support. And that operations return to normalcy soon.
Well it is 71F today in Phoenix so it isn’t a bad place to get stuck.
AA is just representative of the USA as a whole. The country is a crap show that is getting worse and worse. Sure Trump is a disaster but this goes back to congress where for way too many years has no interest in improving things but just make themselves wealthy. Just look at the whole air traffic system they still haven’t fixed in decades, poor infrastructure with bridges, roads, insurance industry getting fat while screwing customers, etc.
Sadly it will only get worse.
They need to go across town and hire off whoever turned WN’s operations after their Christmas operational disaster.
and the second largest number of cancellations is by Republic which flies for AA, DL and UA but the list of cancellations shows it is heavily between AA at DCA and UA at EWR. PSA is also cancelling as aggressively as AA is.
AA has already cancelled 2% of its flights tomorrow and Republic has cancelled 5%.
AA’s gonna AA.
AA is tripping over dollars to save dimes on accommodating FAs in hotels, they’re really going to feel it when FAs bolt to other airlines.
Was at the airport yesterday trying to get on a flight to Seattle. AA managed to get 0 flights off the ground to Seattle yesterday. Alaska and Delta operated all their flights (some with delays). So, the excuse of weather being the reason is pure BS. They kept delaying the flight in 30 minute increments. Plane was there, pilots were there but they did not have the flight attendants. AA kept showing the flight would leave at 4 p.m. when the GA had already announced that the crew was coming from Austin and would be landing at DFW at 5:30 p.m., but still they showed the flight would leave at 4:30 then 5 then 5:30 and so on till the flight was cancelled around 11:00 p.m.
If Amazon can track 100s of millions of packages, AA should be able to track 100s of thousands of crew. Why should FAs need to call in when they can check in via an app?
16 inches of now in 1 day in Rhode Island and the PVD airport closed for the day.
This is one of those stories where you don’t even know where to start….
But a good place would be to replace the Board who are a bunch of utterly useless yes men/women. They are a complete embarrassment and disgrace.
Once that’s done Isom and possibly some top lieutenants need to be gone.
And if they can’t even manage that, there at least need to be severe financial consequences to Isom.
But alas, none of that will happen, because incompetence is the core culture.
This is not the first time this is happened but even worse. I love the fact they offered voluntary leaves of absences for January and a ton of us had vacation. So now the largest base is short staffed and Monday offered incentive pay to ask people to come to work.They’re sending us to work these flights only to have no game plan when we land. Was on hold for 2 hours yesterday still couldnt get anyone then we called DFW operations and management demanding for someone to do something. We will get some bs this was an extreme circumstance and some union we need to hold management accountable and nothing changes. Its a disgrace to passengers and crew. Then to hold a state of the airline message when your crews are sleeping in the terminal total disgrace. They make the dumbest decisions possible. Why fly with us when delta and united don’t do this anddd with older aircraft.
ISOM pack your bags your going on a one way trip
I just spent my whole profit sharing and then some to pay for a hotel room & food.
Glad they cut their IT. Guess all if these self serve tools are working out well.
Pilots are also lost all over the system and are unable to reach scheduling through phone lines or company digital apps.
They also have the same outsourced hotel desk and are left to fend for themselves but the real problem is because communications only work one way at American – operations has lost operational control. They don’t know where pilots are, when they began rest, how much duty time they have available etc.
So far the company has instituted premium pay (for both pilots and FAs) but since the pilots who are not flying and could therefore pick up flying, are all out of position and unable to communicate their duty and rest status to the company, how this is going to solve anything is a mystery.
Despite the usual silly comments, the reality is that AA HAS been the best at weather recovery. And that’s despite some pretty big handicaps, like DFW’s terrible bad weather performance. But, as we’ve also seen, it appears that every airline operation will eventually melt down when “bad luck” creates enough obstacles. I would assume AA will learn something from this mess and try to prevent a similar occurrence in the future.
It is an extraordinary situation, but good optimisation software can handle such situations as long as it has the right data feeding in.
The issue might be as much to do with the software not having up-to-date data than the ability to manage the data.
“continue liek this”
As much as you liek the Citi Strata Elite card!
And so were many more passengers, but I guess FAs are the only victims we need to care about regarding this minor inconvenience?
Like a lot of companies they reduce support staff because they’ve been sold the idea that AI can do it all. Then something like this hits, the AI fails and there aren’t enough bodies to get operations recovered. Typical idiot CEO mentality today. I see in my own employment. Telling people they don’t need tech support they just need a link to an AI chatbot. Which of course is far cheaper.
@Mantis the article is about how crews are out of position and damage that is causing to the operation. There are and will be plenty of articles about how pax have been screwed. But of course nothing will change. The (small) effort by the previous administration to improve the lot of the flying public has been axed. No incentive for these semi-monopolies to improve.
American Airlines flight attendants, frustrated by repeatedly waking up on the wrong side of the cold airport floor after stranded by cancelled flights and the mysterious disappearance of their overnight hotel accommodations, are eager to say “Buh bye” to their Chief Executive Officer, Robert Isom, and some of his other C-suite executives.
Was on a flight from Miami to Charlotte, Tuesday 1/28. that was delayed because they were waiting for 2 flight attendants. Once the crew and plane were ready to go the flight got canceled. No reason. Everyone had there flights automatically rebooked. Mine was rebooked for 2 days later. 1am and there is a line of 1000 people at AA service desk. No thanks. I attempted to rent a car and drive home. No luck. I attempted to call AA as their email me stated. Could not get through. The system just dropped out from under them at midnight and everyone was left to fend for themselves. Going home on Delta.
Hey Mantis.. a “minor” inconvenience?!? I have FA friends who have been stuck places since Friday, that’s 6 days! Please remember that flight crew are humans too with children, pets, elderly parents to take care of, appointments, and responsibilities. We absolutely feel for the passengers who are stranded, but as someone said above there will be plenty of articles about that. The company has failed everyone at this point. I would have picked up Monday or Tuesday but couldn’t risk being stranded somewhere for days (after already being stuck on my previous trip). I go back tonight and am already nervous about making it home Friday.
No one thinks DCA could operate on 1/25/26. However, it shouldn’t take 2 days to recover flying from DCA to ORD. The managerial corner cutting at the expense of passengers and crew is mind-boggling. I saw a flight delayed by hours where a staff member said “your crew is on the way and we’ll board shortly.” 60 seconds later: “the flight is canceled.” Quit the corner cutting!
I finally escaped Phoenix today for San Jose. Everyone at AA in interacted with over the last 28 hours has been exceptional. Pin this rose on leadership and lack of planning. I mean, Dallas never has ice storms, right?
My brother was stuck in CLT overnight and through multiple cancellations while connecting on American Airlines. He finally got home the next day. He said that there were plenty of airplanes, pilots and flight attendants but the crews weren’t complete so they couldn’t fly. It would seem that American Airlines could rework the members of the crews to get more flights out even if specific air crew people were not flying to where they bid on originally.