Think you're life is a living hell! They lost my bag on my return trip home from the Canadian Rockies. I was without my underwear and toothbrush for two days. I checked into a mental health facility and received electroshock therapy.
BTW, what type of perverted idiot would even consider flying to Newark?
PS. Not joking; received my bag late last night. I want compensation.
United Vows Changes to Avoid More Disruptions, Including Fewer Newark Flights
United also offers 30,000 miles to customers caught up in this past week’s flight cancellations and delays
By Alison Sider, WSJ
Updated July 1, 2023 5:55 pm ET
United Airlines UAL 2.14%increase; green up pointing triangle plans to make changes, including flying less at its Newark hub, to avoid a repeat of the nearly weeklong stretch of disruption that snarled travel ahead of the busy Fourth of July holiday, Chief Executive Scott Kirby told employees Saturday.
Rolling storms curtailed departures and led to gridlock at Newark that rippled across United’s network this past week, leaving crews and planes out of place and resulting in thousands of flight cancellations.
“Airlines can plan for things like hurricanes, sub-zero temperatures and snowstorms, but United has never seen an extended limited operating environment like the one we saw this past week at Newark,” Kirby wrote.
The airline is working with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey to get more gates to avoid backups on the airport’s taxiways, and with the Federal Aviation Administration to better balance departures and arrivals at the airport, he said. But United will have to change or reduce its schedule to give itself more buffer, especially during thunderstorm season, he added.
“While we work to control the things that are within our control, we also must do an even better job of planning against the things that are outside our control so we can be in a position to recover more quickly,” Kirby wrote.
United also is reaching out to customers who were caught up in the havoc, offering awards of 30,000 frequent flier miles to those who were delayed overnight or who didn’t get to their destination on United.
Several airlines were affected by severe storms that walloped New York last weekend and early this past week, but United scrubbed more flights than rivals and took longer to bounce back. United’s operation returned to near normal on Saturday—with roughly 1.5% of flights canceled, according to Anuvu, a flight data provider. Kirby sought to explain in greater detail why United was particularly hard hit and why the carrier struggled to recover.
He had separately apologized on Friday for bypassing the disruption at Newark on Wednesday by taking a private flight to Denver from Teterboro Airport in New Jersey. Kirby said that the decision was insensitive to stranded customers and overwhelmed employees and he regrets it.
United’s tough week was a setback for an airline that had largely avoided the sorts of snafus that plagued rivals in the last two years, as air travel demand has roared back from the Covid-19 pandemic. While cancellations and delays rippled beyond the East Coast throughout the week, United’s disruption was smaller and more contained than a meltdown late last year that overtook Southwest Airlines and resulted in over 16,700 canceled flights. United scrubbed more than 3,000 flights over the past week, according to FlightAware, a tally that doesn’t include some regional flights.
In his letter to employees, Kirby reiterated claims he made earlier in the week that United had taken the brunt of air-traffic control staffing challenges.
The pandemic stalled air-traffic controller training, and the FAA has acknowledged that a key facility that guides planes near the major New York airports is particularly understaffed. Airlines including United had reduced the number of flights they planned this summer at those airports at the FAA’s request in hopes of heading off problems.
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg had pushed back after Kirby wrote to employees Monday that “the FAA frankly failed us.” Buttigieg said that air-traffic control staffing didn’t play a major role in the week’s travel snarls, and noted that United’s struggles were more significant than what other carriers experienced.
Kirby wrote Saturday that he had “incredibly thoughtful and constructive” conversations with the FAA and Buttigieg this week. A Transportation Department spokesman confirmed the two spoke but declined to comment further.
The recent problems started with rolling severe thunderstorms that provoked regulators to severely restrict flight operations at Newark Liberty International Airport. The total number of planes that could take off was reduced by 60% to 75% for six to eight hours for multiple days, Kirby said—something airlines “simply aren’t designed” to be able to handle, he said.
Aircraft close calls have been rising, prompting safety concerns. WSJ goes inside the air-traffic control tower at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport to see how controllers juggle around 2,100 flights every day. Photo illustration: Nayon Cho
Kirby isn’t the only airline executive to say that those kinds of limits were unexpected. JetBlue Airways President Joanna Geraghty said this week that air-traffic control imposed lengthier and deeper restrictions than it had anticipated, which made it difficult for the airline to plan cancellations in advance.
Jim DeYoung, a consultant who was previously vice president of operations control at United, said it is rare to see such significant limitations for such a long duration. But United could have mitigated some of the impact by reacting more quickly.
“You always have to have a Plan B,” he said.
Kirby said the problem was compounded by the closure of routes through Canada. In the past, United has relied on the Canadian routes to get planes where they needed to go when thunderstorms made it impossible for planes to fly west from Newark. NAV Canada, which provides air-traffic control services for Canada, said Saturday that most of the delays in Eastern Canada over the past week were weather-related.
Kirby said United also needs to improve its crew technology so that flight attendants and pilots can receive new flight assignments automatically during disruptions, rather than spending hours on hold trying to get through to schedulers. Unions said this week that the airline’s crew scheduling department was understaffed and couldn’t keep up with the pace of flight changes—something they said slowed the airline’s recovery.
Difficulties in matching crew with flights was also a major element of Southwest’s meltdown last year—something it vowed to address with upgraded technology.
Kirby wrote Saturday that United’s systems aren’t designed for the scale of this week’s problems.
“We still have far too much manual work—that’s not acceptable,” Kirby wrote Saturday.
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