The past three weeks have been brutal for the nation’s second largest airline. UAL Corp. (UAUA) the parent company of United Airlines cancelled hundreds of flights between December 16th and Dec 30th as snow storm after snow storm rocked their primary hubs including Chicago O’Hare and Denver International. Crews shortages made the situation even worse.
United cancelled many flights on Christmas day, one of the lighter travel days in the heavily traveled holiday week between Christmas and New Years, to get their schedule back in order. Countless crewmembers were out of place and needed to get back to their specific locations. Planes were also in locations that they were not supposed to be at.
"We proactively canceled a small percentage of flights in order to better acoommodate our customers and get them to their destinations safely and as quickly as possible," United spokesman Jeff Kovick said.
Proactively canceling flights probably was little comfort for the hundreds of people sleeping in the O’Hare airport the 16th/17th.
I was lucky and got out on the last flight to
The pilot's union is saying that the airline is staffed so lean that this was bound to happen.
"The weather wouldn't have mattered if they had enough people," said Herb Hunter, a Boeing 747 captain at United who is a spokesman for the Air Line Pilots Association.
Whether it was the weather that caused this, short staffing or a combination, this can not be good for an airline that is struggling even after spending years in bankruptcy protection.
I work for united airlines as a mechanic and have come to the conclusion the united airlines is now showing signs of self-destruction.
This year I personally witnessed multiple flight cancellations and grounded aircraft due to pilots refusing to fly with broken parts to be deferred and repaired at a latter time. The cancelled flights have resulted in a 5% decrease in revenue passenger miles for this year while the rest or the industry is showing gains of up to five percent.
United refuses to purchase the necessary parts to keep the flight operations going across America. This is a new program called Lean! I t comes at the expense of the passengers.
This problem could have been resolved by increasing the financial budget set aside each year for Maintenance and parts.
Glen Tilton only seems concerned with his compensation of nearly one hundred million dollars obtained from the givebacks and loss of retirement from the employees.
Posted by: Anonymous | January 2, 2008 4:37 PM | Permalink to Comment