Perhaps, but it is a rather stupid way of doing it.

Cacellling flights cost money to the airlines – rebookings, refunds, and so on. And it is really bad for public relations – who wants to fly an undependable airline?

I take them at their word that the issues this week are with employees who are testing positive for Covid and have to quarantine.

Cancelling thousands of flights is not good corporate strategy.

No, thousands of people were looking to fly over the holidays. It is a mess for the airlines to cancel flights and causes great turmoil and customer anger. Your theory doesn’t make sense.

No. A friend of mine is a pilot. It is a real thing. They have to pay all employees whether they work or not in cases where flights are canceled. There is no advantage to the airlines to do so.

@chyna Unless things have changed, flight staff only get paid when the plane is moving, or something similar to that like scheduled flight time, or when they pull from the gate, or only in flight, etc. I don’t remember exactly. I don’t know if we have a flying jelly in the group.

@janbb I didn’t say it’s my theory. Although, I wouldn’t put it past an airline with a half full flight to let the public interpret a cancellation as part of the covid problem. Most flights are full right now though due to the holidays.

Delta has done a lot of cancellations previous to covid. I’m not sure how they run the numbers to make it worth it.

The flight attendants’ labor contract is probably online and will specify what circumstance they’ll get paid.

I think your suspicions are unfounded. What others have said here make excellent sense.

It really doesn’t matter. The airlines were deregulated decades ago.
They are a business and make their own decisions. We have seen choices my their CEO’s change over time. It can be COVID, terrorism, fuel cost, etc. They can cancel based on whatever factors are in from of them.

@Forever_Free That I completely agree with.

@jca2 I’ll look. I don’t think Delta is unionized, but I’ll try to find out. Other airlines are. I was hired by an airline right before 9/11 and I sort of kind of remember the rules for pay for that smaller airline. It wasn’t unionized.

No.

No, unless there is some airline that has disastrously bad leadership somewhere. I don’t think such a strategy would make them any money, and it would risk them getting caught doing petty f*@$ery which would obliterate their reputation if it hit social media.

I just was asking about a stray cancellation during this time frame not the majority of cancellations. I don’t think the whole airline covid problem is made up, I completely accept it’s a real problem. I said a long time ago they should change the quarantine time to a shorter time frame.

So, sometimes (before or during the pandemic) an airline cancels an underbooked flight. and sometimes they may invent a reason to try to reduce customer rage. Many people already assume (rightly, I think) that some fraction of “mechanical problem” cancellations are actually an airline trying to reduce the number of flights to save money.

However, airlines also use many other strategies to avoid losing money that way, and in many cases, it is not a choice they would make, because it’s not just passengers they need to get from place to place – it’s also airplanes, crew, cargo, etc., and a plane changing its plans could mess up their whole schedule of operations.

So not only is it not often they choose to disrupt their schedule, but they don’t need Covid-19 to invent an excuse, and Covid-19 would be a panic-inducing kind of excuse to make up. One of the last things the airlines want, is to increase the number of conversations anyone has about the risk of catching deadly diseases on an airplane! And there is no reason to choose to tell that lie to cancel a flight.

As for current refund policy, when someone needs to cancel a flight for Covid (usually because they’ve caught it or need to quarantine), the airlines have been allowing rescheduling without any of the usual rescheduling fees. Again, this is part of trying to reduce the apparent impact of Covid on air travel.

@Zaku I thought the current situation is flight crew out with covid? Isn’t that what is causing most of these cancellations? That’s why there was pressure on the CDC to change the isolation time for people exposed or sick.

Now, the contagious time for covid is determined to be very similar to the flu or a cold. I have no idea what rules airlines used for flus and colds, if they had any at all. I know in my house we’ve always segregated ourselves from each other once we knew we were starting to feel sick and we used a 4 day rule of being extra careful even though symptoms typically persist for a total of seven days.

According to this the major U.S. airlines pay flight attendants from the time the plane door closes to the time it opens again. https://thepointsguy.com/2015/10/how-are-flight-attendants-paid/amp/

This says pilots are paid per flight hour. https://www.thrustflight.com/how-much-do-pilots-make/

On the news, they said it’s due to the bad weather in parts of the country and also to Covid.

^^Makes sense. I’m sure those are the biggest reasons. In one of the Disney Facebook groups yesterday a member had her flight canceled from Michigan to Orlando and wound up having to connect twice to get to Florida. That sucks.

I don’t know what the current flight cancellation cause statistics are like, nor whether airlines influence the decisions for CDC isolation time guidelines.

I’m sure the CDC follows the science, but the CDC can be slow to make changes. I said months ago the isolation time should probably be shortened to seven days. Now, they went to five days, which to me seems cutting it very close, but better than nothing. Businesses were putting pressure on the CDC from what I’ve been watching on TV. The isolation protocols meant exposed and sick staff were unable to work for over a week.

I found this site with airline delays and cancellations. https://flightaware.com/live/cancelled/ It says 1,432 cancellations today, but doesn’t say total flights, and that is including both domestic and international for the US. This says 2.9 million US flights daily domestic and international combined if I understand it correctly. https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/by_the_numbers/