With a software solution elusive and regulatory approval uncertain, United Airlines extended cancellation for the 737 MAX by more than six months. The troubled Boeing aircraft is now out of the scheduled until June 4, 2020.
In a note to employees explaining the decision, United justified its move by expressing hope this would remove much of the uncertainty in the 2020 schedule:
With the MAX return to service date still unknown, pushing our timeline back to early June is best for our customers and our operation. Moving the return to service date back more than just a month – as we have done previously throughout 2019 – allows us to have more certainty by providing our customers and our operation a firmer and more definitive timeline. With this new date now further in the future, we will better help our customers by reducing the number of our passengers we need to reassign to a new aircraft or rebook on a different flight. This also helps our network team better plan for the year.
While United will make every effort to protect customers’ travel plans, there are consequences to this decision. Those include a substantial number of flight cancellations:
- December 2019 – 75 flights per day (2,300 flights/month)
- January 2020 – 56 flights per day (1,700 flights/month)
- February 2020 – 56 flights per day (1,600 flights/month)
- March 2020 – 80 flights per day (2,200 flights/month)
- April 2020 – 80 flights per day (2,400 flights/month)
- May 2020 – 108 flights per day (3,300 flights/month)
- June 2020 – 108 flights per day (320 flights for the three day period)
These are rough numbers. On some routes, United is using larger aircraft to compensate for reduced frequencies.
If you flight is affected, you will be automatically rebooked.
CONCLUSION
American Airlines and Southwest Airlines have extended their 737 MAX cancellations until April. Based upon the speed of progress, I think United is taking a more realistic approach.
The realistic approach is take them out of the schedule completely.
Boeing has not fixed the hardware design error so the planes remain unfit to fly.
Good. airlines having to deal with rolling delays. There is justice done.