Why such a pullback?
 

AA is canceling 31,000 flights in Nov
JetBlue ended service on 37 routes
Frontier pulled 4000 flights from the fall schedule
Delta cut 4000 flights
United is cutting 50 flights a day out of EWR


What the heck? Every airline is claiming schedule integrity. But things are going fairly smoothly. I geek like something more is at play. Closed door meetings with the DOT prompt airlines to fear delays and or meltdowns.

Demand is sky high right now, across the industry cuts have me a little puzzled

Things are going fairly smoothly?

Because they know they can't staff any more right now. If they try, then the house of cards comes down and "relatively smoothly" becomes catastrophic meltdown within a day or two.

Once you have planes out of position with no crew it spirals very quickly.

Relatively smoothly?

I went like 3 weeks in July without a single on time due to late inbounds, ATC, MX etc.

EWR is a disaster and will continue to be a disaster unless they give it some breathing room.

They’re all in the hot seat right now. Lots of media attention. Get the schedule and operation back on track and make up for the lost flights with higher ticket prices if needed.

Morgan Freeman voiceover:

"Things were not going fairly smoothly."

Fatigue is cumulative. You can push people beyond their max continuous for a while and get away with it. But if you do it too long or too often, it WILL bite you in the butt.

Southwest be like “yeah, we only had 2500 delayed flights in the last 2 days, everything is great”

They can make the same amount of money by offering less flights, and they'll look better in terms of DOT performance too. It's a win win.

Highly doubtful of this statement.

Back in the day… the FAA would not allow a carrier to add an aircraft to be added to their certificate unless said aircraft could be adequately manned both front and back. The POI would monitor man powered manning versus aircraft for scheduling purposes…. Looks like times have changed.