Summer’s nearly officially over and that means the season’s air travel crush – and hopefully the chaos – is set to subside.
The last big summer travel weekend for Americans ended on a relatively high note.
The flight cancellation rate for the Labor Day holiday weekend was 0.6%, a substantial drop from the summer average of 2.2% from Memorial Day weekend in late May through September 1, according to data from flight tracking site FlightAware.
Put that down to a variety of factors, says FlightAware’s Kathleen Bangs, including excellent weather – for the most part – across the US.
“But credit also goes to the airlines for increasing their staffing over the summer,” said Bangs, a former airline pilot and spokesperson for FlightAware.
The smooth performance came on a weekend where the number of passengers screened at US Transportation Security Administration checkpoints exceeded 2019 passenger volumes for the first time over a holiday weekend since the pandemic began.
Is the weekend a harbinger of lower levels of disruption to come?
Fall