Pilot shortage leads to rare flight cancellations at Delta over Thanksgiving holiday

Delta Air Lines canceled hundreds of flights during the Thanksgiving break as it faced a staff shortage during the busiest travel week since the start of the coronavirus pandemic.

As demand remains below half of last year’s levels due to the pandemic, Transportation Security Administration airport checks topped 1 million on Sunday and Wednesday, the highest in more than eight months.

Delta canceled about 300 flights on Thursday, about 20% of its schedule, and about 160 flights, or about 9% of Friday’s schedule.

“A number of factors have weighed on our ability to staff several dozen scheduled flights in a timely manner,” Delta said in a statement. “We apologize to our customers for the inconvenience caused by these flight cancellations.”

The airline expects operations to return to normal over the weekend and said most customers whose flights had been canceled were changed to flights on the same day.

The operational issues, reported earlier by the View from the Wing blog, come after hundreds of pilots took early retirement packages. And earlier this week, pilots approved a deal to accept partial pay for not flying, which would prevent more than 1,700 days off until 2022.

Cuts in the ranks of pilots can create cascading problems because pilots have to be trained and stay up to date on some aircraft and cannot easily switch between them.