US travel chaos as airline cancels 900 flights

AMERICAN Airlines cancelled more than 900 flights yesterday to fix faulty wiring in hundreds of jets, marking the third straight day of mass groundings as company executives offered profuse apologies and travel vouchers to calm angry customers.

American, the largest carrier in the US, has now cancelled more than 2,400 flights since Tuesday, when federal regulators warned nearly half of its planes could violate a safety regulation designed to prevent fires. That’s more than one in three flights cancelled over the past three days.

Daniel Garton, an executive vice-president of American, said cancellations could extend into the weekend.

Airline spokesman Tim Wagner said 60 planes had been cleared to fly, 119 were being worked on and 121 planes had not yet been inspected. The fallout could be seen at airport ticket counters, where frustrated customers bickered with American employees, and on the stock market, where shares of American’s parent company AMR Corp tumbled by more than 11%.

American estimates that more than 100 passengers would have been on each of those cancelled flights.

That means about a quarter of a million people have been inconvenienced this week. Airline executives said they thought they had fixed the wiring two weeks ago, when they cancelled more than 400 flights to inspect and, in some cases, fix the shielding around the wires in their MD-80 type aircraft.

But this week, US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) inspectors, who have been conducting stepped-up surveys of airline compliance with safety rules called airworthiness directives, said 15 of 19 American jets they examined failed.

That left the airline no choice but to ground all 300 of its MD-80s, the most common jet in American’s 655-plane fleet.

“We have obviously failed to complete the airworthiness directive to the precise standards that the FAA requires and I take full responsibility for that,” said American’s chief executive Gerard Arpey.

Back at American’s headquarters in Fort Worth, Texas, Garton apologised and vowed the airline would fix the problem this time.

“We simply cannot put our customers through this again,” he said.