That's a good point. I read somewhere that Delta had twice as many cancel free days as the next best, JetBlue. I can't find the article or when it was from, so take my statement with a grain of salt, or whatever that saying is.

Also, I’m guessing those numbers include the flights cancelled from the 737 groundings...and will skew the statistics on cancellations numbers until those that were scheduled previously and were not replaced are cleared from the time frames, yes?

I can't imagine that (advance) schedule changes are considered cancellations.

Fair enough. Those numbers just seem SO high for AA and SW (who have the most of the most grounded 737s). Even considering weather in TX etc. But I admit to not being knowledgeable about exactly what may, or may not be included in the stats.

I agree,

But very likely they (AA/WN) are running a tighter scheduler/fleet ratio with the Max grounded. So will be less able to recover from day of departure IROPS.

Delta is not affected by the 737 MAX grounding as it doesn't have any of those planes.

Yeah, fair point, their utilization is probably quite high; DL's is probably quite a bit lower, which (in general) allows them to pad schedule times a bit two, which helps on-time arrivals.

And props to DL for this, especially over a holiday weekend. MX on mainline AA RDU - PHL (using miles from the Iberia deal last year) last weekend left us with a trip-in-vain and weekend at home.

Yes, I give props to Delta as well. If anyone reads through my post history, you'll see I complain a lot about Delta - I am no fanboy. But I give Delta credit where it is due, and Delta is just so head and shoulders above any other large global carrier (not just the US3) on cancellations/completion factors that it's not even close.

United is getting way better - with mainline at least. American just doesn't give a crap. And contrary to the posts above, it's not just the MAX factor. I agree that they may run the schedules a bit tighter now, but they cancelled out tons of flights in advance as a result of the MAX issues. That has already run its course. These cancellations are just the usual operational incompetence of American. And when I say operational incompetence, I mean it. American's ops right now are just embarrassing. They are performing like it's still the 70's when it wasn't possible to have integrated, real time dynamic crew and equipment planning or predictive maintenance with continuously measured performance factors that allow for effective continuous improvement.

It's incredible to me that the world's largest airline (American) can't drive more operational excellence. They have the scale and they have the money. Unfortunately I fear it is a cultural gap and those are much harder to solve than any other business challenge.

Southwest's ops are a bit of a mess too - their numbers may be better than American, but they should be higher given the hyper simple ops they run (any plane can run any route with any crew). That said, they do run things tighter than the legacies for obvious reasons so it's difficult to do a direct comparison.

I was referring to American and Southwest when I mentioned the cancellations.