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- American Airlines canceled nearly 700 flights as of Sunday morning after a weekend of cancellations and delays.
- Since Friday, the airline has canceled more than 1,500 flights due to inclement weather.
- American Airlines has also delayed nearly 900 flights over the course of the weekend.
American Airlines canceled hundreds more flights on Sunday, culminating a Halloween weekend rife with delays and cancellations due to inclement weather.
As of Sunday morning, nearly 900 American Airline flights were delayed and more than 1,500 were cancelled since Friday, representing approximately 9% of the airline's total flights, a company spokesperson told Insider.
According to the aviation tracking tool FlightAware, the airline canceled 688 flights as of Sunday morning, a total of 25% of its total flights. An additional 116 flights have been delayed. This follows 543 cancellations and 434 delays from the airline on Saturday, the tracker noted.
According to a letter to staff sent by American Airlines Chief Operating Officer David Seymour on Saturday and shared with Insider, the cancellations and delays are a result of high winds gusts of up to 50 miles-per-hour on Thursday that reduced capacity at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, the company's largest hub.
As a result of the weather, crew members were shuffled out of their normal schedules and flight sequences, leaving many incapable of catching their next flights and setting off a series of delays, the letter said.
"To make sure we are taking care of our customers and providing scheduling certainty for our crews, we have adjusted our operation for the last few days this month by proactively canceling some flights," Seymour wrote in the letter. "We are taking this measure to minimize any inconvenience as much as possible. Most of the customers impacted by these changes are being rebooked the same day, and we apologize for having to make these changes."
Moving into the high-traffic holiday months, Seymour wrote that "the good news" is that the airline is staffing up across the "entire operation," including an estimated 1,800 flight attendants that are returning from leave beginning on November 1 and an additional 600 new hires that will join the team by the end of December.