I've got a lot of plates spinning at the ends of sticks for the next couple of days, including figuring out who to vote for in the Illinois Primary Election two weeks from today. Since I won't be in Chicago on election day, I've got to do this by next Friday at the latest. The other spinning plates are a bit bigger.
Instead, today I want to mention that the Federal Aviation Administration has scheduled a meeting for tomorrow with American and United, because the two carriers have way too many operations scheduled at O'Hare this summer. Cranky Flyer explains:
The basic point of the meeting is to figure out how to come up with a schedule that can actually be operated. As the FAA notes, peak days have more than 3,080 daily operations this year compared to only 2,680 last summer. That is not sustainable. This has been an open secret for months now in the wake of American and United bulking up their operations. There was never any chance that all of these flights could operate without serious operational problems. Now the FAA has to figure out how it wants to implement this.
Of course, we don’t know how the FAA will look at this. Will it agree to reductions based on what’s filed? Or will it look at what flew last year, or perhaps pre-pandemic? Chances are American will argue for going back as far as possible while United wants to use this summer. We will know more soon.
Regardless of what happens, United is likely going to still have a very substantial number of flights compared to American when all is said and done. And that had to be the airline’s ultimate goal.
In theory, all the extra departures should be good for travelers' wallets and bad for their experience getting into or out of O'Hare. I have no flights planned for the summer, though I am planning to plan at least four. I'm curious to see how tomorrow's meeting affects those plans.
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