In recent days, Southwest Airlines, Spirit Airlines and Frontier Airlines have reported that the increase in coronavirus infections has caused a slump in bookings beyond the usual slowdown that occurs near the end of each summer.
A surge in coronavirus caseloads across the nation is starting to dampen the enthusiasm of leisure travelers, with one major airline warning Wednesday that the more contagious delta variant could darken the outlook through fall.
The new flight is part of a 22-route expansion that Allegiant announced on Tuesday.
United, which has 67,000 employees in the United States, has been requiring vaccination of new hires since mid-June.
Experts say some carriers are facing difficulties in finding pilots, flight attendants and ground crew to service flights as they recover from historic declines in air travel, leaving them vulnerable when more routine problems occur.
Airlines for America, a trade group for major U.S. airlines, said it was pleased by reports that the administration plans to make it easier for more foreign travelers to enter the country if they have been vaccinated.
According to tracking service Flightaware.com., 227 Spirit flights were canceled Monday and 58 flights were delayed. Multiple flights from Indianapolis were among those canceled.
Contour Airlines initially agreed to launch the three nonstop U.S. flights in June 2020, but the pandemic grounded its plans.
Southwest said it made money in June even without the government aid and hopes to be profitable by any measure in the third and fourth quarters if the pandemic doesn’t get worse.
Southwest Airlines customers have struggled with thousands of delays and hundreds of canceled flights in the past three weeks. American Airlines is also grappling with a surge in delays, and it has trimmed its schedule through mid-July.
In 2019, the last full year before the pandemic, passengers paid U.S. airlines $5.76 billion in fees on checked bags, according to the Transportation Department.
As of midmorning, Southwest had canceled nearly 300 flights and more than 400 were delayed, according to tracking service FlightAware. Combined, that’s about one-fifth of the airline’s schedule for Wednesday.
The Transportation Security Administration announced Saturday that 2.03 million travelers were screened at airport checkpoints on Friday. It was the first time in 15 months that the number of security screenings has surpassed 2 million in a single day.
The flight will be offered daily for nearly a month before shifting to a twice-daily schedule Oct. 2., with bookings starting June 14.
The plane left the The Leadership In Flight Training, or LIFT, Academy in Indianapolis before 10 a.m. Sunday The academy was founded at by locally based Republic Airways in 2018 to train future commercial pilots and maintenance technicians.
Americans hit the road in near-record numbers at the start of the Memorial Day weekend, as their eagerness to break free from coronavirus confinement overcame higher prices for flights, gasoline and hotels.
The downgrade means that U.S. airlines won’t be able to sell tickets on flights operated by Mexican airlines, a setback that will mainly hit Delta Air Lines, which has a partnership with Aeromexico.
The news of the new flights comes as the airline industry sees a rebound in passenger traffic from the pandemic, which decimated air travel last year.
The airline plans to launch a nonstop flight from Indianapolis International Airport to Orlando and renew nonstop routes to Los Angeles and Boston, the airport announced Thursday.
The passenger count was still 35% below the number of airport travelers reported on the comparable Sunday in 2019, according to TSA figures.
