Indianapolis International Airport officials announced Monday that the airline would offer service to Indianapolis from Savannah, Georgia, and Birmingham and Huntsville, Alabama.
At 6:30 p.m. Sunday, the number of cancellations stood at 2,560 nationwide and was slowly rising, according to FlightAware, a website that tracks commercial aviation. More than 2,700 flights were canceled Saturday.
By late Saturday afternoon on the East Coast, more than 2,600 U.S. flights and nearly 4,600 worldwide had been canceled, according to tracking service FlightAware.
Omicron has intensified already significant staffing issues for airlines, which winnowed workforces in 2020 as air travel collapsed, only to be broadsided when vaccination rates jumped and millions of people felt comfortable flying again this year.
The Biden administration has thus far balked at imposing a vaccination requirement for domestic air travel. Two officials said Biden’s science advisers have yet to make a formal recommendation for such a requirement to the president.
Airlines have canceled roughly 4,000 flights to, from or inside the U.S. since Friday. Delta, United, JetBlue and American have all said that the coronavirus was causing staffing problems.
Globally, airlines scrapped more than 2,700 flights as of Sunday evening, nearing the more than 2,800 cancellations the day before.
The U.S. airlines said they were working hard to accommodate as many passengers as possible, but the disruption comes during one of the busiest travel periods in years.
Passengers should avoid face-to-face contact and surfaces that are frequently touched, and people sitting near to each other should try not to be unmasked at the same time during meals, according to the top medical adviser to the world’s airlines.
The airline had eyed a slot at London’s Heathrow Airport for a flight to Indianapolis, but routes to Pittsburgh and Portland, Oregon, were the only two ultimately awarded.
Airlines are having trouble hiring pilots, flight attendants and other personnel, and that’s part of what is causing canceled flights and scrapping of service to some airports, executives told legislators on Wednesday.
The legislation would require that fees be “reasonable and proportional” to the airline’s cost of providing the service. It will also require airlines to let children under 14 sit with family members at no extra charge.
If the route becomes official, it would be the first trans-Atlantic flight from the Indianapolis since Delta Air Lines discontinued its Paris flight in March 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic.
The pandemic-related restrictions have closed the United States to millions of people for 20 months.
Like other airlines, American encouraged thousands of workers to quit last year when air travel collapsed during the pandemic, only to be caught short-staffed this year when travel recovered faster than expected.
The razor-thin staffing that contributed to thousands of canceled U.S. passenger flights in October doesn’t bode well for smooth holiday travel.
The disruptions were similar in their initial cause and size to problems suffered in early October by Southwest Airlines, and they raised ominous questions about whether major airlines are prepared for the busy upcoming holiday travel period.
Indianapolis-based Republic Airways announced plans Thursday to start what it says is the state’s first aircraft dispatch training program.
The Federal Aviation Administration proposed Thursday that flight attendants get 10 consecutive hours of rest between shifts. The proposal does not change the current 14-hour limit on a flight attendant’s work day.
The decision to pare service highlights the difficulty that Southwest and other carriers have had adding workers since the summer, when demand surged more than expected after COVID-19 restrictions were lifted.
