Originally Posted by
ksucats
Just curious on everybody's thoughts on what flights AA will choose to cancel. Will it be ones where both origin and destination are on the list of 40 or will it be smaller regional jet routes where only the hub needs to be reduced? Selfishly I hope it is not the smaller airports as I have a trip next week where neither my origin or destination is on the list and I am on the last flights of the day, but going through DFW. The flights to the larger markets typically have a higher frequency of flights which could make it easier to reaccommodate passengers, but there could be more passengers affected. My biggest hope is that they make the cancellations 48 hours in advance to give time to find alternative flights.
It’s actually worse than that, because the direction is 10% reduction in volume. Hub and spoke systems will thus lose 10% of inbound and outbound flights. It’s fine to talk about up-gauging aircraft and stuff, but let’s look at the reality via an example:
Hub AAA has five banks each day, with inbound flights during all banks from airports BBB to KKK, and one or two banks each day have inbound flights from some number of airports X01-X35. Let’s say each bank is 20 inbound and 20 outbound flights. The airline must reduce each bank by 2 inbounds and 2 outbounds…it can’t really kill the flights from/to the X01-X35 airports that only have one a day, and taking one of two a day makes for connection issues. Even worse, the low number airports include all the most lucrative international flights. In both cases you end up with possibly idle aircraft and positioning issue. So the airline will most likely have to do two things, cancel frequency to a number of non-hub big airports AND reroute passengers through other hubs to make things work.
The programming required to optimize this and know they can, for instance, push some DFW connections to PHL and vice versa to compensated for passenger loads and routing needs will be quite intense, and something is gonna be decided wrong. Expect stories of families who were flying from MSY to OMA via DFW and arriving at Noon to have been routed MSY-PHL-OMA and arrive at 5 PM for instance (insert pictures of screaming kids).
And don’t forget that this won’t be resolved by Thanksgiving week. It’ll take at least a week to 10 days to pay a basic flat rate check to TSA and ATC, and a couple of months to sort out the actual pay. These are also employees who were told that they could not take off for scheduled, approved (and perhaps paid for) holidays during the shutdown, so anyone thinking those employees will be whistling zippity-doo-da and dancing with little birdies because it’s been resolved are dreaming. Resignations and retirements will spike again, like they did after the 2019 shutdown, and then they improved TSA pay and work rules to try to recruit more, faster…that option is missing now. As for the ATC’s, recruitment already often failed to reach goals, let alone replacement, and that has been both shutdown for what will likely be 25% of the year (classes underway have to be restarted) and now the old saw of a government job is a reliable job has been proven false. Recruitment is gonna fail to meet goals again, and staffing gets shorter/pressure gets higher.