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.
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.
The Amazon founder was accompanied by a hand-picked group: his brother, an 18-year-old from the Netherlands and an 82-year-old aviation pioneer from Texas — the youngest and oldest to ever fly in space.
Stocks were down broadly Monday out of concern over rising infections in many countries, and airline and cruise line stocks were hit especially hard.
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.
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.
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.
According to crowdsourced data from the gas-station-finder app GasBuddy, fuel shortages were reported in 14 states as of Thursday afternoon.
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.
A McCordsville man has been sentenced to nearly four years in federal prison after using multiple—and often elaborate—fraud schemes to steal more than $750,000 from his Carmel-based employer.
United Airlines says it will train 5,000 pilots this decade, including taking on applicants with no flying experience, and plans for half of them to be women or people of color.
With no nearby direct flights to Indianapolis available, Baylor University and Gonzaga University fans had to go well out of their way to attend the culmination of the 2021 NCAA men’s basketball season Monday night.
The flights, which will run from May 27 through Labor Day weekend, will connect Indianapolis with cities in Maine and South Carolina.
U.S. air travel is already picking up. More than 1 million people have passed through U.S. airport checkpoints each of the last 11 days, with Sunday’s total topping more than 1.5 million for the first time in more than a year.
Sunday marked the fourth straight day that TSA saw more than 1 million people pass through its checkpoints. That has not happened since March 2020, when travel was collapsing at the start of the pandemic.
The Global Business Travel Association estimates that worldwide spending on commercial travel won’t recover to its pre-pandemic peak of $1.4 trillion until 2025.
Routes to both cities begins at the end of May. The airline also plans to offer service from Indianapolis to Rapid City, South Dakota, in August for the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally.
New air travel restrictions enacted by the Biden administration and other nations to prevent the spread of new, more-contagious variants of the coronavirus might be affecting hopes for a speedy return to travel.
