United gives 30,000 points to customers affected by breakdown

United Airlines will offer 30,000 MileagePlus points to customers who were heavily impacted by the airline’s spate of cancellations and delays between June 24 and June 30. 

The points will be given to customers who were delayed overnight or didn’t get to their destination at all. 

“Running an airline means managing things that are in our control and being ready to adapt to things that aren’t,” chief customers officer Linda Jojo wrote in a letter to customers over the July 4 holiday weekend.

From June 25 to June 30, United canceled more than 3,200 mainline flights, amounting to 19.6% of its mainline schedule, FlightAware data shows. The carrier also delayed 54% of its flights over those six days. 

The operational breakdown began ahead of severe thunderstorms that passed though the New York-New Jersey area on June 25 and June 26, deeply impacting United’s Newark hub. Early last week, United CEO Scott Kirby blamed much of the carrier’s difficulties on the FAA, which he said reduced Newark arrival and departure rates by more than could be expected ahead of the storm due to staffing shortages. 

Blame Canada

But in a letter to staff on June 30, Kirby offered a more thorough explanation of what caused United’s nearly weeklong breakdown. The CEO also laid out new steps United will take to avoid a repeat. 

In Newark, he said, the FAA sharply reduced the number of departures per hour between June 24 and June 27, including reductions of more than 50% for nine hours on June 26 and six hours on June 27. 

“Airlines, including United, simply aren’t designed to have their largest hub have its capacity severely limited for four straight days and still operate successfully,” Kirby wrote. 

He further explained that dealing with thunderstorms, which typically roll into Newark from the west, has become more challenging post-pandemic because Canada, like the FAA, has a shortage of air traffic controllers. Previously, said Kirby, United could reroute flights north out of Newark over Canada to avoid thunderstorm activity coming in from the west, but Canada has closed those routes. 

After the June 25 and June 26 storms, United took the remainder of the week to recover because heavy operational disruptions had left aircraft and crew scattered out of position around the country, Kirby added. 

Prior to last week, Kirby frequently touted measures United had taken to boost reliability in the constrained post-pandemic environment, such as higher staffing per flight hour, more conservative scheduling and increased deployment of spare aircraft.

United CEO would like more Newark gates 

On June 30, the CEO spelled out a series of new measures United will implement to shore up operations. They include further Newark schedule reductions, especially during thunderstorm season. United is also working with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which runs Newark Airport, to obtain more gates there, Kirby said. 

With the FAA, Kirby said United has increased day-to-day communications about Newark, including working on balancing arrival rates with departure rates. Such a balance, he wrote, would prevent departing aircraft from getting caught on the taxiway in a bottleneck of recently arrived aircraft that are waiting for a gate.   

Finally, Kirby promised staff members that United will upgrade crew scheduling technology to make it fully automated — a situation that would do away with the long hold times that stranded crew members experienced last week. 

“While we work to control the things that our within our control, we also must do an even better job of planning against the things that are outside are control,” he wrote.

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