United Airlines may have averted a Southwest Airlines-style holiday meltdown, but its performance heading into the very busy travel period was alarming. The airline canceled 26% of its flights on Wednesday, June 28, and delayed another 45%, according to data from Flight Aware.
That's a terrible kickoff to a travel season where it's very hard to rebook passengers on canceled flights as most options are sold out. Part of the blame goes to weather conditions in the Northeast, but rivals including JetBlue (JBLU) and Delta Air Lines (DAL) had similar delay issues, but ultimately only canceled 6% and 2% of their flights respectively.
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Southwest Airlines (LUV) does not appear at all on the June 28 Flight Aware report for June 28 or 29, although the airline did show 29% delays and no cancellations on the June 27 report.
United Airlines (UAL), however, appears to have mostly righted its ship as it was only showing 13% of its June 29 flights delayed and 14% canceled. That's a big improvement and means the airline did not fall into a meltdown like the one Southwest suffered over the Christmas season.
One key airline industry figure, however, has charged that the airline has done something very wrong to its staff in order to get back on track.
Image source: Robert Alexander/Getty Images
United Airlines Accused of Bad Behavior
Flight attendants union boss Sara Nelson posted a disturbing charge against the airline on her Twitter page.
This is the situation across the country @united for crews. Unacceptable! Passengers should know this means these crews are not legal to work a reassignment, which exacerbates the problem. This is NOT an ATC problem. Management needs to implement @AFAUnitedMEC demands now! pic.twitter.com/reA8d7LOaS
— Sara Nelson (@FlyingWithSara) June 28, 2023
The picture posted with the post, however, raised some questions from View From the Wing, a respected travel blog.
"However this photo tweeted out of Ms. Nelson, who had been considered for head of the AFL-CIO, is clearly of passengers in the C-North terminal of Houston Bush Intercontinental," wrote the blog's Gary Leff. He shared some reasons why it was clear that the picture did not depict crew members for the following reasons:
- These are passengers in plain clothes
- There are children present
- And not a single crew bag in the picture.
That does not mean that Nelson's charges are untrue as she may be speaking directly with impacted United workers, but the image clearly shows passengers. That's something others noticed on social media as well who posted in response to her charges.
"I get the frustration as I'm in the middle of my 6th delay and likely cancellation, but these are NOT flight crews. These are passengers. Stop with the misinformation," Shannon wrote.
"These do not appear to be flight crews waiting for deployment. You need to clarify this post," wrote Jonathan Doss.
"Why are there no uniformed employees or bags?" added Lord Brunell.
United Airlines Responds
While United did not directly address the charge that crew was being forced to sleep at the airport, it did send a response to TheStreet, which has requested a "statement on the Sara Nelson allegations."
We’re beginning to see improvement across our operation. We expect to cancel far fewer seats today compared to yesterday and our baggage backlog at Newark has dropped more than 30% since Tuesday, and off-duty flight attendants are calling in from across the country to staff open trips. It’s all-hands-on-deck as our pilots get aircraft moving, contact center teams work overtime to take care of our customers, and our airport customer service staff works tirelessly to deliver bags and board flights. As our operation improves in the days ahead, we will be on track to restore our operation for the holiday weekend.
United currently shows no delays on Friday, June 30 when other airlines have already delayed 551 flights and canceled another 124 globally, according to Flight Aware.
