The day after Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg met with airline leaders to quiz them about widespread flight disruptions, his personal flight was canceled and he wound up driving from Washington to New York.
“That is happening to a lot of people, and that is exactly why we are paying close attention here to what can be done and how to make sure that the airlines are delivering,” Buttigieg advised The Associated Press in an interview Saturday.
With flights dropped throughout the U.S. by the 1000’s Thursday, Boston Logan International Airport had dropped 119 flights and 387 had been delayed by 5 p.m. Friday, the Herald has reported, which provides as much as about 58% of flights arriving at their vacation spot inside quarter-hour of the scheduled touchdown.
Buttigieg mentioned he’s pushing the airways to stress-test their summer time schedules to make sure they’ll function all their deliberate flights with the workers they’ve, and so as to add customer-service employees. That may put stress on airways to make extra cuts of their summer time schedules.
Buttigieg mentioned his division may take enforcement actions in opposition to airways that fail to dwell as much as consumer-protection requirements. But first, he mentioned, he needs to see whether or not there are main flight disruptions over the July Fourth vacation weekend and the remainder of the summer time.
Enforcement actions can leads to fines, though they are usually small. Air Canada agreed to pay a $2 million nice final 12 months over sluggish refunds.
During Thursday’s digital assembly, airline executives described steps they’re taking to keep away from a repeat of the Memorial Day weekend, when about 2,800 flights have been canceled. “Now we’re going to see how those steps measure up,” Buttigieg mentioned.
Travel is again. On Friday, greater than 2.4 million folks handed via safety checkpoints at U.S. airports, coming inside about 12,500 of breaking the pandemic-era excessive recorded on the Sunday after Thanksgiving final 12 months.
The file certainly would have been damaged had airways not canceled 1,400 flights, a lot of them as a result of thunderstorms hit elements of the East Coast. A day earlier, airways scrubbed greater than 1,700 flights, in keeping with monitoring service FlightAware.
Weather is at all times a wild card relating to flying in summer time, however airways have additionally acknowledged staffing shortages as journey roared again quicker than anticipated from pandemic lows. Airlines are scrambling to rent pilots and different employees to exchange staff whom they inspired to stop after the pandemic hit.
Source: www.bostonherald.com”